Topic: Liberal Fascism
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of people who describe themselves as “medical ethicists.” What exactly are the qualifications for that job? And what do they do all day? Writing in the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson answers my questions:
They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.
And in that cozy, happy world, they spend a good deal of their time dreaming up alibis for such things as partial-birth abortion and—get this—“after-birth abortion.” In plain language, that means killing a newborn baby.
Ferguson’s article details the “thought experiment” performed by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, two Australian medical ethicists, whose conclusions about “after-birth abortion” were presented in the Journal of Medical Ethics. “When circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion,” they write, “what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”
In other words, a woman’s right to an abortion includes the right to have her newborn baby killed after its birth, if it has a disability or even if she changes her mind about motherhood. Since the “circumstances…that justify abortion” boil down to the woman’s “right to choose,” it logically follows that women possess this power of life and death as an inalienable human right. And besides, a newborn baby doesn’t really understand that it’s being deprived of its life…
Progressivism has been called “the party of death.” To the extent that progressives tolerate such views from people pretending to talk about ethics, it’s an accurate description.
