Killing Babies

There has been a lot of noise on the blogosphere about the article in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing that we should be allowed to kill new-born babies.  There has been more noise about the Journal editors' apologia justifying the publication of the article.

Personally, I am glad it has been published, for a few reasons.

One is that if Medical Ethicists are really thinking this, we should know about it.  The second is, it exposes both the paucity and the inhumanity of their arguments; let us hope that other and better academics get published exposing both. The third is that it may just provoke a moral awakening in people of good will: the one point on which the authors are clearly correct is that the unborn child and the newly born child are of the same moral worth.  My prayer is that people will draw the correct conclusion from that premiss: that abortion is therefore absolutely wrong.

The apologia was interesting, though.  Whilst claiming a position of academic moral neutrality, it also assumed a tone of indignant outrage that some criticism had been couched in terms it deemed 'racist.'  As so often, the neutrality disappears when something we really believe in (in this case the inherent evil of racism) is at issue.  From which I can only conclude that their 'neutrality' on infanticide is a neutrality that condones the notion - or they would be similarly outraged.