“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…
With pride we present a brand new cartoon about the current GOP candidates, with a very familiar host, and a surprise stealth candidate. With some actual we want to reflect in the most accurate way possible the current state of affairs of the Republican Primary and the candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin (yes, Sarah Palin!). Without further ado:
Mitt Romney statement about being “not being concerned about the very poor” is not a Kinsley gaffe, nor a Freudian slip: Although he was inadvertently revealing his ill-advised “marketing strategy”, he wasn’t being disdainful or scornful of his non-target audience: just plain naïve about how well this revelation would play after his Florida Primary victory. Anyhow, the direct result of this stupid error is an element of truth in the Obama 1%-against-99% narrative that will be played 24/7 in case he secures the Republican nomination.
