Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva: To hell with Godwin's Law, they are Nazis

After yesterday’s post about the Giublini-Minerva Paper, I was reasonably invited to read it, because everybody knows newspapers are as unreliable as an automobile without brakes. So I read it, and now I can say that what is in it it’s even worse. They tried to sugarcoat hell and failed miserably. The dynamic duo Giublini-Minerva also wasn’t misquoted nor were their assertions taken out of context.

I was expecting a very difficult reading, i.e. something insidious, very difficult to comprehend but well based enough to make a rebuttal a very difficult job. On the contrary, it was a well-written paper (if you can stand boring-to-death political correctness writing style), with crystal-clear redaction (they can’t claim misinterpretations) and a very lame exposition of ideas that reeks not of facism but of Nazism, to hell with Godwin’s Law, because this time the argument suits completely. The only joke here is that they made themselves perfectly clear.

In Giubilini’s and Minerva’s brave new world, it is not enough to be a human, you have to be a person, or have the potential. Personhood cannot be granted by default (birthright is not an issue, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing), only on a case-per-case basis. Fortunately, science can decide – and will decide – if a newborn is a viable person. Through all the reading you can infer that, according to their logic babies are not an asset but a liability. The size of this liability increases with disease, until it becomes a burden to the mother or society. To be granted personhood, a baby must prove his/her affordability, i.e. his/her economic and social viability with science acting as the referee.

Paradoxically, according to the medical ethicists we have more “moral rights” for the non-existent “people of the future” than for sick fetuses and newborns. It is better to terminate the pregnancy than to give a baby in adoption because “of the mother who might suffer psychological distress from giving her child up for adoption.” Unsurprisingly, everything is working the way of abortionists (before and after birth) in the world of Giubilini and Minerva.

Giubilini and Minerva may call themselves medical ethicists and show the diplomas to prove it, but there’s little or no difference in what they expose and what eugenicists of the XIX and XX so eagerly exposed and practiced. Entire categories of human beings (Down syndrome kids, blacks, Jews) were considered then a burden that neither individuals nor society could carry, so that the logical, scientifically reason-bounded decision was to get rid of them. Syphilis “experiments” in Tuskegee, forced sterilizations in Sweden and yes indeed, concentration camps are the logical children of the policies of eugenics and un-personize human beings.

You can kill with ease when it’s not a human what you are killing. Ergo, you start dehumanizing fetuses and newborns (What’s next?). Ironically, animals have nowadays more successful and vocal advocates.


Tell me if there’s a difference between Giubilini and Minerva and nazi eugenicists.

Related articles

• Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva: To hell with Godwin's Law, they are Nazis (sipmac.blogspot.com)
• A Further Defence of Giubilini and Minerva (bigthink.com)
• If Ms. Rapp would have being praying, it would have looked like her prayers were answered (sipmac.blogspot.com)
• After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live? (johnwsmart.wordpress.com)
• Killing Infants: The Right to Argue (bigthink.com)
• Infanticide is repellent. Feeling that way doesn't make you Glenn Beck | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)
• Ethicists Say Killing Babies Should Be Legal, Draw Controversy (inquisitr.com)

If Ms. Rapp would have being praying, it would have looked like her prayers were answered

“I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me. I don't regret a single minute of this parenting journey, even though I wake up every morning with my heart breaking, feeling the impending dread of his imminent death. This is one set of absolute truths”.

Absolutely nobody will question Emily Rapp’s truths. Her baby son Ronan suffers a genetic disease called Tay-Sachs, and she undoubtedly suffers a gruesome ordeal, first by taking care of her son, and knowing he will die this same year. She says that although she went through all possible pregnancy tests, those test failed to detect the horrible malady that afflicts her son. Otherwise, she would have aborted her son.

End of story? No.

This extreme approach of a very extreme case was used by Ms. Rapp and Slate Magazine to contradict Rick Santorum’s perceived extreme assertion that “prenatal testing increases the number of abortions.” While this is completely true (severe handicaps are included in abortion laws), and prenatal test actually can determine the course of a pregnancy, keeping people in the dark is not an option. That would be extreme, indeed. For Santorum, there is not a fortunate choice of words to express this point of view.

Just a couple of days after Ms. Rapp’s testimony, we got news of the article entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” written by two Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, medical ethicists linked to Oxford University. The article was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

In the meanwhile Prof. Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, denounces that Mr. Giubilini and Ms. Minerva have been the target of death threats by “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

Make no mistake: I condemn these threats. You might find Giubilini’s and Minerva’s assertion inhuman and despicable, but that doesn’t justify murder. On the other hand, this is the very slippery slope pro-lifers were denouncing for years: first, you have to accept that life doesn’t begin at conception (i.e. you become a human being after a few weeks — the same way a recently fertilized egg is not a chicken). Now, rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”, as the medical ethicists explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

The pro-lifers could say: add euthanasia and assisted suicide to all this, and the culture of death becomes full circle. And the next step in the slippery slope would non-productive members of society?

Be careful what you wish for…

Related articles

• Emily Rapp on Why the American Public Sphere Really Does Not Need Rick Santorum, or This Republican Party, at All (delong.typepad.com)
• 'After-birth abortion' is logically sound: that's why it will boost the pro-life movement (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• 'Babies are not real people': Female Oxford academic claims doctors 'should have the right to KILL unwanted or disabled infants' (victimsofatoscorruption.wordpress.com)
• Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say (oyiabrown.wordpress.com)
• Slaughter newborn kids, say academics (thesun.co.uk)
• If Ms. Rapp would have being praying, it would have looked like her prayers were answered (sipmac.blogspot.com)
  
• If Ms. Rapp would have being praying, it would have looked like her prayers were answered (sipmac.blogspot.com)
• Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva: To hell with Godwin's Law, they are Nazis (sipmac.blogspot.com)