After Birth Abortion

Philosophy asks all kinds of questions. So does medical ethics. Don't get upset over this stuff. It has nothing to do with being pro-choice or pro-life. You are taking it out of context.

Dawn

I believe I read this a long time ago and it was a philosophical/medical ethics question where they go to the most extreme on an issue and disect as a tool for decision making. I'm not in philosophy or medicine, but that was my understanding - that it wasn't real, but an exaggeration of an issue.

This is not the position of any "pro-choicers." The article quoted in this piece is by two PHILOSPHERS, neither of whom asserts that this is their personal stance. It was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, not a magazine for the general public (before someone from Slate decided to review it out of it's intended context) It's an argument about morality, not a policy suggestion.

If you are at all familiar with the discipline of philosophy, the argument shouldn't shock you, moreover, it's more than likely used later as an argument against ALL abortion because it makes an "if then" claim where the then is so unacceptable that you want to reject the if as well ("if abortion is morally acceptable, then infanticide is acceptable")

It's an interesting intellectual/philosophical excersize, but take a breath... no. No pro-choicers support this... there's nothing to support.

The original article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva is TYPICAL of medical ethics... it's not a proposal (unlike how many pop media writers have taken it), it's an ethical question, in an ethics publication, designed specifically to spur on ethical conversations.

And it's RELEVANT in the medical community and the EXTREME MINORITY of parents who have children born with hours or days to live... how those hours and days are handled.

Extreme measures? For how long? Who decides?

Do parents lose custody? (parents who cannot afford to pay for the millions in medical costs often lose custody to the state or 'medical fostering', so that their baby's medical costs can be paid for).

If parent's have lost custody, who legally decides when to "unplug" a braindead baby on respirators, artifcal heart, artifical kidney machines. (A baby, or adult, can often remain on life support for DECADES, costing millions every single month, and in places where there just isn't a lot of technology available, children who could be saved by those machines, die for the lack of them available).

If parents have NOT lost custody.... fill in about 40 questions here.

If parents wish to unplug, but someone else wants to 'adopt' the baby (whether or not it could ever survive), how is that handled?

Hundreds and hundreds of questions are being decided on AS WE SPEAK on how to handle birth of previously "stillborn" infants, who can now be kept alive on life support, with no hope of ever being taken off of it. How to handle insurmountable medical costs for families where babies CAN survive (after millions, even hundreds of millions in medical costs) but there is no way the family can afford to pay -and in many cases, no way the HOSPITAL can afford to pay. This is a trickier question that when there is no chance of survival. When there's a slim chance, but 9 other babies will die because this slim chance is already hooked up?

These pop articles tick me off. (I'm already cranky these days;)... becuase this isn't a general populace moral highground free for all.

A few hundred babies every year, a few hundred families... out of the millions and millions born every year. Maybe 2 per Children's hospital, 3 or 4 per state... something not only most people will never see.. but most DOCTORS will never see.

It's not a 'learn as you go' sort of thing. It's something that a very select few have to deal with. Which makes it PARAMOUNT that it's discussed in the ethics journals and medical communities if there is to be ANY kind of reasoned consensus.

Technology is exploding, not just growing by leaps and bounds. We can SAVE children -who then go on to live normal and healthy lives- that we could never have saved. But it creates soooo many problems:

- Kids who could "easily" be saved that the parents don't want to
- Kids who could be "easily" saved, but the parents can't afford to
- Kids who could NEVER be saved, but the parents want to
- Kids who could NEVER be saved, but the state steps in and tries to (taking away custody)
- Kids who could have been saved if the equipment was available
- How those hours and days are handled
- Legal ramifications
- and more
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At OSU I took a class called Death and Dying. We saw a video where a couple had a baby and it had several severe disabilities. They opted to stop feedings and allow the child to die.

Dr. Edgley made sure everyone had extra tissues before it started. It was terribly sad. The mom was an RN and understood the suffering this child would have gone through in the short time it would have had anyway.

I just thought is was terribly sad and would hope I was never in the position to have to make a choice like that. Because I would move hell or high water to make every possible effort to find a way for the child to live and not suffer.

I know some LDS friends who got marred and then found out several months later they were expecting a child shortly after their first anniversary. Through the mom's prenatal care they discovered the child had a health issue that would not allow it to live outside the mother for more than a few hours and maybe even just minutes. The doc's kept asking the couple if they wanted to do an abortion so they could try again sooner.

They did say no. That they had to allow their child to live as long as possible and that the child's life was in God's hands, that the end of it's life would be in His time line.

They had the baby and everything stopped until the baby passed away. They held their child for those extra hours that it lived beyond the expected time. They believe they will see their child again some day and will get to be with it in heaven.

I can't help but feel terribly sad for anyone going into a situation like this. There could be very little on this earth that would be worse.

I think the article has been taken out of context. I don't believe any (sane) person would support this concept. Rather, I believe the authors of the article introduced the piece as part of a bioethics debate. The journal provides a space for professionals to enter into philosophical debate and exchange.

"Is this a pro-choice manifesto, carried to the ultimate, logical conclusion, considering children not their own unique selves but something and someone not quite human?

Or could it be its subversive opposite, the best pro-life argument anyone could imagine, exposing the darkest, selfish reasoning at the end of what seems the sensible point that a “woman is in control of her own body”?

The authors say neither, and have since issued an explanation that tries to quell the firestorm. In an open letter, they say: “The article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments,” referencing debate of the issue going back 40 years.

“We expected that other bioethicists would challenge either the premise or the logical pattern we followed, because this is what happens in academic debates. And we believed we were going to read interesting responses to the argument, as we already read a few on this topic in religious websites.

“However, we never meant to suggest that after-birth abortion should become legal. This was not made clear enough in the paper. Laws are not just about rational ethical arguments, because there are many practical, emotional, social aspects that are relevant in policy making (such as respecting the plurality of ethical views, people’s emotional reactions etc). But we are not policy makers, we are philosophers, and we deal with concepts, not with legal policy.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/a...

This was not the most uncomfortable topic we discussed in my philosophy/ethics classes. And it was talked to death. Even then, the professors could never get everyone to agree, but there was a consensus that the mother-fetus/infant relationship is a unique relationship. Therefore the only ones equipped to make moral decisions about it are the: 1.one who is most affected AND most able to give consent, and 2.ones who are the most knowledgeable of the medical details and possible outcomes of any action. In other words, these decisions should only be made between a woman and her doctor, and leave the law out of it.

When I read their article (not your link but the article the two gentlemen wrote) several months ago, I interpreted it as an argument against abortion. I thought they were taking typical arguments in favor of abortion and extending them into the first few months of the newborn's life in an effort to appeal to pro-choicers and convince them that abortion is wrong.

This is not an uncommon approach, as many people will try to win and argument by supporting the other side through most of the argument only to in the end prove their premise false.

Basically, I thought they were being sarcastic to prove a point - abortion is wrong. Just my take.

No, of course I would not support this. Honestly the idea of what is commonly known as bioethics, has been around for quite some time. Consider this a group of people who think they are cutting edge with their idea of what is "ethical" and what is not.

Think about it this way. There are a group of extremes on both sides. They are very, very few on both sides. It's like the rights side that says abortion is completely amoral, including tubal pregnancies that will lead to both the mother and the child deaths. I don't know many (or any) people that would say, yes let's force the mother to carry a baby until they both die.

Just as I don't any left pro choicers that would agree with this.

ETA: I'm pulling my answer only because I took this article out of context and so I don't feel it's pertinent to this thread. That the article was purely on theoretics escaped me on first reading. I'd been out and about with Kiddo all day and my brain was pretty tired when I first read it.
And frankly, I'm too tired to read it again. Still, a rather chilling topic to get 'theoretical' on. Reading the article was a bit like reading a thread on a political forum.

Someone always has to push the envelope! I am definitely pro-choice but I would never think that this is okay. Once you give birth, the only option is adoption.

I don't think I understand...does this mean that a baby who has a defect of some kind, like downs syndrome, should have been aborted, so they can be killed after they are born? Really?

I have to say NO I would not support this at all. But, maybe I am understanding it wrong...I sure hope so.

Sorry, I decided to delete my original response.

So, do they explain what they mean by "would have justified abortion"? What exactly justifies it? It seems the law allows for the whims of the woman carrying the baby to be justification enough. So.... wouldn't it pretty much follow (per this article) that it "should be permissible" for the woman to have it done for ANY reason? Sounds like genocide plain and simple to me. Not unlike an "unsuccessful" abortion (which results in a live birth) where the baby is denied medical care until it dies.
In my opinion, it is all part and parcel of the same thing.

May I suggest that you consider the source when choosing news outlets.

After reading, this paragraph gave me the most insight into what was trying to be accomplished:
"The challenge posed to Furedi and other pro-choice absolutists by “after-birth abortion” is this: How do they answer the argument, advanced by Giubilini and Minerva, that any maternal interest, such as the burden of raising a gravely defective newborn, trumps the value of that freshly delivered nonperson? What value does the newborn have? At what point did it acquire that value? And why should the law step in to protect that value against the judgment of a woman and her doctor?"

This is actually a couple of pro-life (if I have correctly interpreted, I may not have) philosophers. Their aim in extending the logic followed by pro-choice advocates to "post-birth abortions" was to show (what is in their eyes) the complete ludicrousness of the line that currently exists to allow/not allow an abortion.

I THINK this was the aim of their logic. Someone please correct me if you see something I missed.

Interesting proposal. Looks like the other posters clearly understand that this is a proposal by two philosophers put forth for debate. (and not a serious political proposal)

What's interesting about the conversation among the mamas here, is that women truly understand the consequences of having children.

I wonder... if MEN opined on your question, would we get some different responses? Seems to me that a lot of them have strong opinions on what women should do with their bodies. (And only 17% of Congress is female right now.) hmmm