Prof at University of Chicago: Kill All Babies with Birth Defects


It did not stop with abortion being permitted only so far into a pregnancy. And if some physicians, professors, and abortion advocates have their way, snuffing out young lives will not stop with birth either. The matter under serious consideration is whether infants should be euthanized shortly after birth if they have profound birth defects.

Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and human evolution at the University of Chicago, recently posted a defense of killing disabled infants on his Why Evolution Is True blog:

If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born?

His argument, which is riddled with flaws and mistaken assumptions, begins with a claim commonly found in the works of pro-infanticide philosophers:

After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties). It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state.

In short, lack of sentience and reason boosts the moral acceptability of killing deformed and handicapped infants. This reasoning makes sense only in a “throwaway culture,” which presumes that it’s right to discard the weakest and most vulnerable simply because they don’t meet an arbitrarily imposed marker of when life is worth saving.

What Coyne proposes is the legalization of killing as a way of eliminating suffering. His proposal and beliefs are informed by his worldview that sees humans as just a more advanced form of life. This is an incredibly dangerous position to take, if for no other reason that it leads to eugenics, and ultimately to the weeding out of those who are not deemed to be of value to society. A decision to be made by … whom?

Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, and Patrick Lee, a professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville, have pointed out, in “The Wrong of Abortion,” additional problems with this argument:

This argument is based on a false premise. It implicitly identifies the human person with a consciousness which inhabits (or is somehow associated with) and uses a body; the truth, however, is that we human persons are particular kinds of physical organisms. . . . We are not consciousnesses that possess or inhabit bodies. Rather, we are living bodily entities.

George and Lee continue by arguing that “it makes no sense to say that the human organism came to be at one point but the person — you or I — came to be at some later point,” because “to have destroyed the human organism that you are or I am even at an early stage of our lives would have been to have killed you or me.” Coyne’s primary claim, that lack of sentience or rational faculties significantly bolsters the case for killing disabled newborns, is flawed.

What we are dealing with here is a professor who sees humans simply as an advanced form of animals, devoid of souls, and thus valuable only to the degree that they can enjoy life and contribute to society. In other words, we are just the best that evolution has managed to come with — so far.

There is no spark within persons that somehow connects them with the divine, regardless of how such a relationship is envisaged, partly because no such divine exists. In fact, one might question the professor as to how he would even define personhood.

This essay in National Review that critiques Professor Coyne’s arguments lay out the case against infanticide in such a way and with such persuasiveness that it gives one chills to even contemplate the act.

Source: National Review



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