May 15, 2013 (NCRegister.com) – You might recall that British politician, Colin Brewer, who last year said that disabled children should be killed to save taxpayer money. You might recall that at the time he apologized and stepped down in disgrace. But you probably didn’t know that he was re-elected to his old seat this year. And he’s at it again.

This time, he reportedly compared disabled children to deformed lambs that need to be culled. In an interview with none other than the Disability News Service, Councillor (yeah, they spell it that way) Brewer said that perhaps we should be treating disabled children like the runt of a litter of lambs which are often disposed of by smashing them against the wall.

“If they have a misshapen lamb, they get rid of it,” he said. “They get rid of it. Bang.”

Bang? That’s sound fiscal policy, huh? And that’s what it is, according to Brewer. He said that disabled people are just too expensive to care for so some may just have to go.

“We are just animals,” Brewer continued. “You can’t have lambs running around with five legs and two heads. It would be put down, smashed against the wall and be dealt with.” I always love when people say humans are just animals because the next sentence out of their mouths usually goes a long way toward proving it.

When asked if there was any difference between killing a lamb or a human being he simply said, according to Disability News, “I think the cost has got to be evaluated.”

“It is not something I would like to do but there is only so much in the bucket,” he reportedly said. “If you are talking about giving services to the community or services to the individual, the balance has got to be struck.”

Balance? If anyone here seems imbalanced, it’s those who voted for Brewer. I’d be interested in asking him and anyone who supported him how much is the price tag on a human life? When caring costs, what’s the limit?

Now, you might just say that it’s just one crazy old dude so who cares. But here’s the thing — he was just re-elected earlier this month to his old seat. That means that being pro-infanticide and culling the disabled is no longer a deal breaker in European politics. Sure, he may be eccentric but he’s just fighting to keep taxes down, right? And if there’s a fiscal problem it’s not really a fiscal problem at all, it’s just a wall shortage. Because remember, every fiscal disaster is just an opportunity to cull.

And who is the enemy? Those who stand between them and the wall.

And please don’t think that it’s just a European thing. We all just went through the Kermit Gosnell trial and the Live Action videos that showed killing babies outside the womb may not be as rare as we were led to believe.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel who acted as a special health advisor to President Obama, reportedly said in 1996: “Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.”

Who judges who is a participant, I wonder? And how much participation is warranted for treatment?

New Hampshire’s Martin Harty, a freshman state legislator, resigned from office after saying he wished “defective people” could be exiled and left to die in Siberia. Still unclear if he understood that Siberia is not in the U.S., but geography is not really the main problem here, is it?

And who can forget that just a few years ago Supreme Court Justice Ruth Vader Ginsburg told the New York Times that “at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Two questions arise. Who is the “we” and who are those we don’t want to have too many of.

No position is so radical in the 21st century as the radical commitment to love. No belief is so derided as the belief that every life is sacred. Maybe it has always been this way. Maybe it always will be. But whether it’s in the name of racial purity or economic well-being, it ends up with some at the wall. Bang.

A breakthrough in embryonic stem cell research that could lead to people receiving transplants based on their own tissues has been both hailed by scientists, but received a cautious response from ethicists, who have warned it again raises big questions about when life begins.

In a world first, a US team of scientists used a human skin cell to create a cloned human embryo from which they were able to extract embryonic stem cells.

Published in the journal Cell, the discovery involves a technique known as therapeutic cloning. Skin cell DNA was inserted it into a human egg that developed into an early-stage embryo, or blastocyst.

The scientists said the resulting stem cells had the potential to be turned into a variety of cell and tissue types for use in organ repair and transplants.

Dieter Egli, senior research fellow at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute, was among those who described it as a significant step.

He said that if embryonic stem cells could “be made from adults like us, that would mean we could make replacements for any type of cells we would need”.

Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, Head of Bioethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, said it was far too early to conclude the research would lead to therapy, and opposed the creation of an embryo for it later to be destroyed.

“I don’t support the destruction of human embryos and I think it is a very sad way for us to go in Australia,” he said.

He said it was unnecessary because similar results were possible through the use of what are known as induced-pluripotent stem cells, which are not derived from embryos.

Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee chairman Ben Canny said the latest breakthrough was unlikely to change the debate, but would prompt a return to complex ethical questions about whether it was acceptable to destroy a life to save a life.

“An ethical minefield has not opened up, it has been there for many years,” he said. “It goes back to when the first cloning of Dolly the sheep was done in the 1990s.”

Professor Canny said his view was that the ability to clone human embryos was an important therapeutic development. As long as the ethical questions were broadly debated in society and carefully regulated, then the benefits would outweigh the concerns.

“I have no problem with the way it’s regulated now,” he said. “There are several levels of committees and important safeguards to make sure that the people who donate these materials are fully aware of how they will be used.

(1) Possibly, the factual content of the pamphlets is false; therefore, LifeChoice is unjustified in their distribution of the pamphlets; and
(2) LifeChoice members are also unjustified in making propositional truth-claims about the dangers of medical drugs such as RU486, because they are not of sufficient medical expertise.

Now, being charitable to the arguments for the moment (clearly they are not well formed, but we can understand the main idea), I think it is obvious that (1) is simply unjustified, and (2) is contradictory to (1).

Consider (1). It is very hard to see how a legitimate inference can be made simply on the basis of the POSSIBILITY of LifeChoice Sydney’s pamphlets’ factual inaccuracy that therefore LifeChoice Sydney ought not to be able to promote their pamphlets. Not only was the assertion of factual inaccuracy grossly unsubstantiated by critics, but arguably LifeChoice Sydney can defend these claims and show why they are, in fact, correct. It simply is not an argument against the distribution of information that such information might be factually mistaken if a society putting forth that information really believes it to be true and substantiated. Consider everyday political discourse and argumentation. Or consider historical claims, for example. Most (if not all) major fields of enquiry utilise this kind of method every day. Even science puts forth theories which can turn out to be false and even superseded on new evidence. So this is not a justified argument.

But consider now (2). How can someone possibly hold to (2) whilst also affirming (1)? Think about it. The fundamental assumption underpinning (2) is the claim that without sufficient medical expertise, one is not justified in making propositional judgements concerning the abortive drug RU486. Therefore LifeChoice Sydney should not make the kinds of truth-claims about RU486 that it does. But wait a minute! Didn’t argument (1) point out that, possibly, the information contained in LifeChoice’s pamphlet about RU486 is FALSE? That itself, however, is a propositional truth-claim about RU486 presumably made by non-medically-trained individuals! This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Critics would need to put forth a truth-claim about RU486 in (1) whilst also denying LifeChoice Sydney members’ right to do so on (2), even though the critics themselves fail their own test for judgments on this matter (sufficient medical expertise). This is sheer hypocrisy; an unacceptable argument.

So not only is (1) unjustified, but it is also impossible to argue (2) legitimately if you also hold to (1). We should therefore reject both arguments in criticism of LifeChoice Sydney as false. If the critics are to maintain their position, then, what they need to do is to find a way to justify (1) sufficiently (which seems impossible) and find a sufficiently informed medical expert to argue (2) convincingly (and it is not at all clear how they can do that). Unless and until they can do that, then LifeChoice Sydney’s pamphlet drop campaign about abortive drug RU486 remains justified in the fostering of discussion and open dialogue on matters concerning abortion and euthanasia in Australian society.

In February this year we reported that the South Australian branch of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) had written to all South Australian lower house MPs roundly criticising this and another end-of-life related bill proposed by The Hon Bob Such MP.

The February letter was unprecedented in as much as it used very direct and unambiguous language that seemed to this writer to contain an element of some frustration at yet-another euthanasia bill.

The letter, in referring to both bills jointly said that, “(T)he AMA(SA) strongly opposes both Bills, considering them to be fundamentally and irretrievably flawed.”

They further observed:

“It is of significant concern that these Bills appear to have major elements that are ill-conceived, indicate a fundamental lack of understanding of current concepts in end-of-life care, and show a confusion in understanding of the critical difference between palliative care and euthanasia. They have the potential to confuse and compromise the provision of good end-of-life care, with resulting distress to patients and their families. We do not believe that these Bills have been the products of an acceptable level or period of informed community and stakeholder consultation and engagement and consider that they would bring divisiveness and confusion.”

One would have thought that this would have sealed the bills fate. Apparently not.

Such was quick to defend his bill, calling into question various aspects of the AMA statement. One comment was to observe that the letter was signed by the AMA’s Chief Executive Officer – a lawyer – and not the AMA President. This is perhaps a little lame given the fact that the AMA nationally have a policy opposing euthanasia and that the CEO is hardly likely to issue an edict without referral both to the policy and the state executive.

It is not exactly clear why the AMA decided to communicate to MPs via a second letter at this time. However, if there was any doubt about the AMA’s strident opposition after the first letter, this latest missive should leave no room for question at all.

Signed on this occasion by the AMA(SA) President, Dr Patricia Montanaro, in addition to repeating the statements already quoted, please consider the following:

“Even for individuals who may support euthanasia, the AMA(SA) regards these Bills to be in the realms of dangerous folly which have the potential to damage the basic tenets of clinical practice in ethical and compassionate end-of-life care. We recognise that there are divergent views on euthanasia and that the voluntary euthanasia bill proposed may go to a conscience vote. However, these Bills would simply create bad, and damaging, legislation.”

“The assistance that good palliative care can provide is not well understood, and we have a crucial need for good, well-resourced palliative care. Euthanasia must not be the end point of poor resourcing of end-of-life care.

“We urge Members of Parliament to turn your valuable attention, time and advocacy in the House to the critical need for a health system that strongly supports good end-of-life care.

Introducing fundamentally flawed voluntary euthanasia legislation is not the way to do this and in fact will produce the opposite effect, with resulting distress and harm.”

The letter also made reference to interventions by the SA Law Society and the Palliative Care Association of South Australia who clearly raised similar concerns.

What more needs to be said? If the medical association is saying that they don’t want euthanasia laws to be passed (and especially not this bill), why is the debate continuing and why do some MPs still support such legislation.

Firstly, there should be no real objection (apart, perhaps from fatigue!) in having these debates. Mr Such is as entitled as any MP to table bills. As a consequence, MPs should be entitled, if the opportunity arises, to speak on the bill (note: something that was denied them in Such’s previous bill in 2012) Well-researched and well-crafted speeches can definitely enhance understanding and can raise to tone of debate.

And of course, there are those who really do want to see such legislation passed.

But what kind of legislation would it be if the medical body representing doctors across the state say that they don’t want it? After all, it will be these doctors who will be asked to carry out a patient’s request.

It reminds me of a story told by eminent Australian academic, Margaret Somerville in her book Death Talk where she suggested to an audience of her colleagues that perhaps euthanasia should be performed by lawyers rather than doctors; adding that at least the lawyers would understand the law!

The question remains to be answered in the debate on Such’s euphemistically titled Ending Life With Dignity Bill 2012. Will the parliament impose a system which is clearly not wanted or will they continue to endorse the status quo in the knowledge that to do so protects the vulnerable as it always has done. Moreover, will they continue to look for ways of improving end-of-life patient care in the knowledge that, as the AMA suggest, it is really an either-or situation; that euthanasia acts to undermine patient-centred care.

For more information visit the HOPE website 

Imagine a society, all of whose laws were just, and in which no law essential to the protection of the natural rights of its citizens was absent or deficient. In this society the law is also fairly and efficiently administered.

Then imagine the very opposite sort of society, one whose laws systematically favor some over others, allow unjust discrimination, even to the point of unjust killing, rape, or enslavement of some disenfranchised class of persons, and in which even good laws are unfairly or only occasionally enforced.

And imagine both societies not just at one time, but as they exist over several generations, as children are born and raised under such legal regimes, coming to accept and internalize the demands made or not made, the values recognized or not recognized, by the legal fabric of their society.

Such thought experiments make clear that the law does not simply create a stable pattern of behavior—just or unjust—over time, although it does do that. Rather, the law also creates a culture, and it does this precisely insofar as it instructs citizens about the moral code that will govern them and therefore constitute its cultural outlook and framework. The law, that is to say, teaches.

A legal regime that permits the killing of innocent human life, then, does morethan simply permit an injustice against some class of persons: As we have seen in the case of Kermit Gosnell, now awaiting a verdict in Philadelphia on multiple charges of murder and illegal abortion, the law teaches the legitimacy of this injustice, and thus erodes its citizens’ understanding of the nature of justice.

In the Gosnell case, of course, the primary “lesson learned” concerns the denial of the moral claims that all human beings are equal, and are not to be treated as things. Thus, the wrongness of the law is not simply a matter of its practical consequences; a permissive abortion law that—somehow—resulted in fewer abortions would still express precisely the wrong lesson to a nation’s citizens. And a citizenry whose culture is founded on a radical misunderstanding of justice is, to that extent, a weakened, and even, for reasons that I will explore shortly, an unfree people.

Modest First Steps

In the face of this double travesty—the wrong done to the unborn, and the misshapen moral norms inculcated by the law to its subjects—what can be done? Hadley Arkes has, over many years, advocated a strategy of “modest first steps” that addresses both of these difficulties.

In Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes details the progress of two different, and limited, challenges to abortion law: the effort to pass a ban on partial-birth abortion and the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act (BAIPA). In partial-birth abortions, the body of the child is delivered and the head left in the birth canal. The skull is then punctured and the cranial matter suctioned out before the head is removed. The ban on partial-birth abortion was to put an end to this procedure. The primary purpose of BAIPA, meanwhile, was to ensure that infants born alive after a failed abortion were to be treated as full persons before the law, and given the protections due to persons.

For Arkes, problems inherent in the partial-birth abortion strategy justify favoring the Born Alive strategy. Partial-birth abortion is, after all, an abortion, and it was only to be expected that judges with a vested interest in maintaining the abortion license would find fault with a law that proposed no principle, but only the grotesquery of a means, as a reason to restrict one procedure out of many.

By contrast, BAIPA was grounded in a principle that could only be rejected at great peril; yet that principle did indeed have consequences for the wider abortion license. The principle was this: A living human being, exposed to the world, whether born because of a failed abortion or because of a successful birthing, is no less a person for the circumstances of his or her arrival, or the desires of his or her parents and their doctors, than any other; thus such living human beings—in this case infants—are entitled to all the legal protections which it is the fundamental purpose of the state to offer.

This principle could be rejected only at the expense of the full-bore acceptance of the moral and legal legitimacy of infanticide, a step for which few judges, legislators, or citizens, pro-choice or not, were ready. The law thus had a much more secure path to passage and judicial security than the partial-birth abortion ban.

Yet the principle at work in BAIPA was the same principle that shows legally permitted abortion to be a grave injustice at law: the principle, that is, that all human beings are created equal and are possessed of equal natural rights. So while BAIPA could not be easily rejected, its conceptual implications could not be easily avoided.

This modest first step, therefore, moved the law in a direction that would, as apractical consequence, perhaps save lives. But it also created a conceptual impetus that might conceivably move the law in a different direction altogether from its prior track. The modest first step was thus also an eminently teaching moment of the law: It showed the tension in the thought of those who both deplored infanticide and applauded abortion, a tension that the Gosnell case has now once again vividly brought to our attention.

Law in Crisis

Today, just as before, we see another opportunity to introduce a principle both for practical and conceptual effect. For we can easily see a different understanding at work in contemporary abortion jurisprudence than the principle that all human beings are created equal, and possessed of equal natural rights. Rather, the dominant understanding is one that rejects the ideas of natural rights, of human nature, and of moral knowledge.

This new understanding holds that protected status, as Arkes has put it, “must turn entirely on the positive law, for there are apparently no objective standards that yield an answer objectively true. . . .The question, ‘What is a human life?’ becomes a question for political authority, and the question will have to be answered then without the consultation of any standards of moral judgment outside of the opinions held by those who exercise power.”

But this is an inherently unstable situation, for if this is the understanding that undergirds the right to abortion, or any other right at all, then these rights, like the rights of the unborn, and, indeed, like all rights, are in reality incapable of moral vindication. The deep assumption that only judicial or legislative decision (or, for that matter, the votes of a majority, or the edicts of kings) grounds rights means, in the end, that there are no natural rights at all.

Pro-life legal scholars have thus argued that contemporary abortion jurisprudence undermines the very notion of natural rights. But in doing so, that same jurisprudence likewise undermines the ideas of law, of political society, and of constitutional government. For all these ideas are tied precisely to the fundamental task of the law, namely, the protection of those natural rights of man that precede, in their existence, political authority, and serve as that authority’s ground and end.

This point about the corruption of law might be put as follows: As Aristotle noted, the end of constitutional government is a rule of law, not men. For the rule of law, where the law is guided and shaped by and around the natural rights of men, is a law for men, though not created by men. In its limitation by objective moral norms, the law provides a standard against which the desires, wants, and power-plays of mortal men are to be judged, and against which those desires may on occasion be found wanting and called to account. Such a rule of law is thus an order of liberty for human persons, for no human being is made subject, as such, to the rule of another, but only to the rule of law and right.

But this order is subverted in contemporary jurisprudence, and in any politics that takes as its axiom the Protagorean claim that “man is the measure.” For the “man” in question is always some particular man or men, and it is the lives of others that are measured by these particular men. But that, unlike the rule of law, is in fact a form of servitude, of subordination, to the will of others, a subordination known in our own day by the unborn, as in another day it was known by African slaves and their descendants.

But it is a subordination built into the contemporary understanding of law; no human being is thus, in principle, untouched by this understanding; the citizenry of a polity whose laws are built on this understanding is thus, to that extent, no free people at all.

The stakes of the abortion debate are thus of overwhelming significance. For the problem of abortion is, in fact, not one problem. It is, on the one hand, the problem of a massive injustice done to the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human community, but it is also a challenge to the existence of our own—or that of any comparable society’s—political community, the fabric of which is undermined by an unsustainable and manufactured “right to choose.”

Kermit Gosnell’s clinic, with its stench and decay, is here both a symptom and a metaphor for a culture, legal and moral, that has lost its principled grounding in human dignity and human rights. It is only in the legal recognition of the moral rights—the natural rights—of the unborn, that this two-sided tragedy of law, politics, culture, and morality, can finally be exorcised and the promises made in our nation’s founding documents on behalf of the rights of all human beings finally be realized.

Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. This essay is adapted from his contribution to A Second Look at First Things, aFestschrift in honor of Hadley Arkes, which will be released next month.

The Life Institute has said that the decision of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) to vote against abortion legislation is ‘hugely significant’ and pointed out that doctors have now voted for the second time in five weeks to oppose the Government’s proposal on abortion.

Spokesman Dr Seán Ó Domhnaill said that it was “especially important to note that an original motion put to the ICGP conference which supported the Government’s proposed abortion bill was rejected by doctors.”

“Doctors rejected a motion supporting the current abortion proposal, since it is, frankly, unworkable and unacceptable, and then adopted a motion which called for guidelines to provide clarity for doctors instead.”

“This means that, for the second time in 5 weeks, doctors have voted down legalising abortion on suicide grounds. So when is the Government going to start listening to the medical experts on this issue,” he asked.

Instead an amended motion was adopted by the ICGP which calls on the government to “introduce clarity in the law founded on evidence based medical guidelines where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother”.

The amended motion was passed by 60 votes to 48.

“Last month, when doctors at the conference of the Irish Medical Organisation voted against abortion legislation, doctors who support abortion legislation refused to accept the result, and sought to have a motion supporting abortion passed at the ICGP conference, but that has failed too,” said Dr Ó Domhnaill.

He said that much had been made of a survey carried out by a member of the small grouping Doctor’s for Choice , which claimed that 85% of GPs supported the provision of abortion. “Clearly, the fact that doctors have voted down motions calling for X-case legislation for the second time in 5 weeks show that GPs do not support the provision of abortion,” said Dr Ó Domhnaill. He called on an Taoiseach, Enda Kenny to listen to the medical experts who had repeatedly rejected the proposal. “Some 113 psychiatrists have also opposed the inclusion of suicide in the legislation, and Mr Kenny now appears to be responding only to political concerns and not medical requirements,” said Dr Ó Domhnaill.

To think that all pregnancies fit this description would be naive. For many women discovering that they are pregnant is daunting and isolating. Financial difficulties, unstable relationships, and the prospect of being a young single mother are all factors that can turn pregnancy into a crisis, a burden. Some women conceive in environments void of love and support and the thought of bringing a child into the world is completely unbearable. Some expectant mothers may be on the brink of a fantastic career or still in the process of an education and raising a child would take away everything they have worked so hard for and rightly deserve.

What if we could eliminate the crisis? What if all women could experience love and support in bringing their son or daughter into the world? What if pregnancy was not an inconvenience but a new and exciting path that could co-exist with a woman’s aspirations?  The Babe’s Project is providing this love and practical support, one woman at a time.

The Babe’s Project is vibrant pregnancy support centre in Croydon, they recognize the importance that “real practical and emotional support is first priority for a woman.” The Babe’s Project goes beyond the fundamental essentials in pregnancy support and creates an environment where women can enjoy the everyday joys that come with pregnancy.

My friend is 22 weeks pregnant and describes her pregnancy as a joy. She says;

It is delightful to hear a friend so happy. It is encouraging to know that there are people at the Babes Project turning crisis pregnancies into wonderful experiences.

The Babes Project Website: http://www.thebabesproject.com.au/

WE’VE made abortion such a sanitised, abstract subject, guarded by aggressive feminism, that discussion of its realities is off-limits in polite company.
Even the word “abortion” is politically incorrect, replaced by the euphemism “choice”, or more recently, “reproductive justice”.

While societal attitudes are becoming more nuanced in the face of technological advances allowing us to see clearly inside the womb and keep premature babies alive earlier than ever, the zeal of abortion enthusiasts to shield women from the truth continues unchecked.

No nuance is reflected in the demonisation of the Catholic Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

As health minister in the Howard government he once said Australia’s high rate of abortion was “an unambiguous moral tragedy”, but did nothing to change abortion law. That is the province of state governments anyway.

What he did was offer vulnerable women more choice _ in the form of a Pregnancy Support Helpline _ to make them aware of all the options available in the case of an unwanted pregnancy. Thus, he is enemy No.1 to the Emily’s List brigade.

There is no nuance, either, in the campaigns by GetUp and the Greens to liberalise state abortion laws nationwide. Nor in Tasmania’s Labor-Green government’s determination to introduce draconian legislation, modelled on existing Victorian law, threatening doctors, counsellors and protesters with jail and hefty fines for opposing abortion.

Take, for instance, Melbourne GP Mark Hobart, who refused to refer a woman pregnant with a female foetus for an abortion because she and her husband wanted a boy. That’s choice for you.

The couple procured an abortion anyway, but Hobart says he broke the law by refusing the referral and risks being suspended or deregistered.

Since the story broke in this newspaper, commentary on the case has sought to dismiss Hobart as a political partisan because he is a member of the pro-life Democratic Labor Party.

But how does the revelation of his pro-life belief excuse the practice of sex selection abortion?

Perhaps it just means he is more attuned to the moral problems involved and less influenced by our collective denial of reality.

Every now and then, a story arrives to expose the unpalatable truth about abortion, that it is not just a medical procedure to remove tissue, but entails the death of a small helpless human.

The Kermit Gosnell trial winding up in the US does so with horrendous clarity.

Gosnell is the Philadelphia abortion doctor charged with murdering four babies who were born alive while being aborted and over the death of a woman allegedly administered too much anaesthetic during an abortion.

The clinic he operated for 30 years has been described as a “house of horrors”, piled high with body parts.

One former staffer testified: “It would rain foetuses.”

Another testified about the sound of a baby screaming after it was born alive. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien.”

Some pregnancies were as advanced as 30 weeks, and some aborted babies lived for as long as 20 minutes.

One boy was so big Gosnell joked he could “walk me to the bus stop”.

The detail is complete with colour photographs of perfect, chubby, fully formed dead babies, whose bodies were found by police on a routine prescription drug bust.

The horrors of the Gosnell case are so inescapably graphic that even half a world away people are paying attention.

There is little room for abstract arguments when you are confronted with jars of severed babies’ feet.

Of course, local abortion enthusiasts have been busy claiming the case is an aberration, that it proves the need for less regulation of abortion and that blame belongs with abortion protesters.

The Gosnell case offends them because it renders absurd their contention that abortion is just another medical procedure, without a moral dimension.

And the fact is that babies do survive late-term abortion, even in Australia, although few hit the headlines. There was the case of baby Jessica Jane, aborted at 22 weeks in Darwin Private Hospital in 1998, but who was born alive, weighing 515 grams, and with “good vital signs”.

She lived for 80 minutes, alone in a kidney dish, though a sympathetic nurse wrapped a warm blanket around her as she died.

At the time, the Northern Territory coroner said similar deaths had occurred elsewhere in Australia and that his counterpart in NSW had disclosed that “many terminated foetus live after they are expelled from the mother”.

This apparently ho-hum fact was dealt with last year by Australia’s medico-ethical establishment when two Victorian academics published an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics advocating “after-birth abortion”.

They claimed “the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn”.

This is really the only logical end game to a culture of normalised abortion.

Once you destroy the taboo protecting human life, Gosnell-style killing factories are the result.

The central philosophical challenge for those who claim that not all human beings are persons is to identify non-arbitrary criteria for personhood: criteria that includes all those human beings that are undoubtedly persons and excludes only those that might plausibly fail to be persons. Differences of size, location, dependency, and development between a feotus and newborn are morally irrelevant,[3] for Singer himself acknowledges that “The liberal search for a morally crucial dividing line between the newborn baby and the feotus has failed to yield any event or stage of development that can bear the weight of separating those with a right to life from those who lack such a right.”[4]

The danger of arbitrariness forces a move toward criteria chosen because of their obvious connection to the powers and abilities of mature human persons, namely a move to functionalism. The most plausible characteristic here is “consciousness” and in Singer’s words “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”[5]

The criteria as it stands, that one must be conscious to qualify as a person, excludes sedated human beings, those knocked out in a boxing match, rendered unconscious by a car accident or sleeping adults, a reduction to absurdity. And if we instead claim that you are a person only if you have an immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness, we will include sleeping adults, but exclude those in temporary comas. Nicole Hassoun and Uriah Kriegel attempt to remedy this dilemma by speaking of being capable of consciousness rather than being actually conscious. One ought to be actually conscious to be a person. To exclude the possibility of potentiality, that is the potential of a feotus developing consciousness, they appeal to the following analogy:

• Suppose oysters could be made conscious upon being transported to Mars.[6]
• A space elevator is installed between Earth and Mars and an oyster finds its way to the elevator.
• At this point, the normal course of events should lead to that oyster’s becoming conscious in the absence of intervention.[7]

Hassoun and Kriegel conclude that the oyster on the elevator is thus potentially conscious in the sense in which foetuses and neonates are—the oyster is, so to speak, en route to consciousness—yet it still seems intuitively permissible to kill the oyster. Abortion is therefore morally permissible.

If per impossible oysters were indeed rational creatures simply in need of the right developmental conditions in order to flourish, then they would have rights to live.[8] The fact of the matter is however that on this planet oysters do not have the capacity to develop rationality, but embryos, feotuses and newborn infants do and can.

Christopher Kaczor instead defends an endowment account of human personhood against the performance accounts defended by Singer, Tooley, and others. A performance account of human personhood holds that a being is to be accorded respect if and only if the being functions in a given way, whereas an endowment account holds that each human being has inherent moral worth simply by virtue of the kind of being it is. And by “endowment” Kaczor means “an intrinsic, dynamic orientation towards self-expressive activity [such as] . . . rationality, autonomy, and respect.”[9] Are you a person because you are something that actually engages in rational and free conscious activity, or are you a person because you are the kind of thing that engages in rational and free conscious activity?[10]

Any plausible performance criterion (rationality, self-awareness, sentience, and so on) implies qualitative measurements by which all of us can and do differ dramatically; if the criteria for personhood come in degrees, then some of us would be more personal than others hence destroying any foundation for equal human dignity and rights.

If, on the other hand, we accept that all human beings are persons, there are still those who argue that abortion is nevertheless acceptable because the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the unborn person. It was Thomson’s claim that women who do not wish to be pregnant have no duty to maintain the life of the unborn person within them. She appeals to the following analogy to illustrate her argument:

• Having been abducted against your will, you wake up in the morning and find yourself attached back to back to an unconscious but famous violinist. He has a fatal kidney ailment and needs your kidneys to remove the poisons from his blood. It is only for nine months that the violinist needs to be plugged to you, but to unplug him at anytime before that would kill him. [11]

Thomson argues that to unplug one’s self from the violinist would not be morally impermissible. And so too a pregnant woman can justifiably “unplug” herself from the human feotus, even if the human being in utero is, like the violinist, fully a person. In other words, the human feotus may have a right to life, but this right to life does not include the right to make use of a woman’s body. A woman has the right to disconnect herself from the human feotus, and this does not violate the feotus’ right to life, even if such disconnection ends the feotus’ life.

John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford University, responds to Thompson by asking whether or not the chosen action, i.e. reaching around your back and unplugging the violinist to save your life, would have been chosen if the victim had not been present?[12] The obvious answer is no! The subtle philosophical point that follows is that if you would choose the action regardless whether the violinist was present or not, then this is ground for saying that the bad aspects of the action, viz. its death dealing-effects on the victim (child or violinist), are not being intended or chosen as an end or means, but are genuinely incidental side effects that do not necessarily determine the character of one’s actions. It is worth asking the same question with respect to the moral permissibility of removing the cancerous womb of a pregnant woman. The question here is whether the hysterectomy would be chosen if the woman was pregnant or not. The answer here is yes: yes, the life saving operation would be undertaken if the woman was pregnant or not. Since this chosen action, removal of the cancerous womb, would be the same with the controlling consideration present or absent, it ought to be deemed morally permissible.

Finnis then considers whether the chosen action, unplugging yourself from the violinist, involves not merely a denial of aid to him but an actual intervention that amounts to an assault on his body: is abortion a choice not to provide assistance or facilities or a choice to “commit murder”?[13] The traditional rule about abortion is that if the mother needs medical treatment to save her life, she gets it, subject to one proviso, even if the treatment is certain to kill the child – for the woman’s body is her body. And the proviso? The medical treatment not be via a straightforward assault against the child’s body, for after all the child’s body is the child’s body not the woman’s.[14] The claim that “this body is my body” is binding even when made on behalf of another person. The argument that we have a right unto our body should cut both ways impartially. The unborn, like her mother, has a “just prior claim to her own body”, and abortion involves laying hands on and manipulating that body.[15]

To deny the unborn the status of personhood is to destroy any foundation for equal human dignity and rights. Yet to concede the unborn is a person will undermine the claims of Thompson and others who argue that the right of a woman to her own body ought to entitle her the choice to terminate the life growing within her: for rights and claims to one’s body can only co-exist with the status of personhood. A mother’s just claim to her own body cannot surpass the just claim of the unborn to her own body (albeit if defended by a bystander), for they exist on the same moral plane.  Abortion is philosophically and morally indefensible; yet to concede this fact would mean governments have to invest in pregnancy centers that support unwanted pregnancies financially, emotionally and psychologically, and in education programs that teach on the value and dignity of all human life – amenities we all ought to demand.

I am, as they say, on the wrong side of the argument. A YouGov poll out this week demonstrated convincingly that the public strongly support the idea that we have a right to choose when we die. Doctors still don’t, MPs don’t, and the clergy don’t. But even the majority of people in the pews now support assisted suicide.

And I have little doubt that, soon enough, the law will follow. These days, people say they want to die quickly, painlessly in their sleep and without becoming a burden. Apparently, this is what a good death now looks like. Well, I want to offer a minority report.

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other. Obviously, I know people are terrified of the indignity of dying and of being ill generally. Having someone wipe our bums, clean up our mess, put up with our incoherent ramblings and mood swings is a threat to our cherished sense of personal autonomy.

But this is where the liberal model of individual self-determination breaks down. For it is when we are this vulnerable that we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be loved and looked after. Lying in a bed full of our own faeces, unable to do anything about it, is when we break with the idea of René Descartes’ pernicious “I think therefore I am”.

No, we are not brains in vats. We are not solitary self-defining intellectual identities who form temporary alliances with each other for short-term mutual advantage. My existence is fundamentally bound up with yours. Of course, I will clean you up. Of course, I will hold your hand in the long hours of the night. Shut up about being a burden. I love you. This is what it means to love you. Surely, there is something extraordinarily beautiful about all of this.

Likewise, I have no fondness for pain per se. And I can even imagine taking a draught of something myself one day, were some pain to become utterly intolerable. I do understand. And, yes, even understand that helping others to do it can sometimes be an act of mercy.

But it is also right to push back against the general assumption that pain reduction is unproblematic. For pain is so much a part of life that its suppression can also be a suppression of a great deal of that which is valuable. Constantly anaesthetising ourselves against pain is also a way to reduce our exposure to so much that is wonderful about life.

Yet too many of us make a Faustian pact with pharmacology, welcoming its obvious benefits, but ignoring the fact that drugs also can demand your soul. That’s perhaps why we speak of the overly drugged-up as zombies.

Finally, the contemporary “good death” is one that happens without the dying person knowing all that much about it. But what about the need for time to say goodbye and sorry and thank you? It is as if we want to die without actually knowing we are dying.

Much of this originates in the excessive fear we now have of dying, a fear that is amplified by the let’s pretend game that we play when we remove death from public view. It is precisely this fear that operates when adults worry about taking children to the funeral because “it will upset them”.

As with many things like this, it is a reflection of adult anxiety rather than the child’s ability to cope. And the message it communicates is that death is something strange, weird, and spooky. This only serves to incubate our fear and encourages us to devise further strategies to keep the full knowledge of its reality at bay.

My problem with euthanasia is not that it is a immoral way to die, but that it has its roots in a fearful way to live.