Not everyone in the “pro-life” camp is singing from the same song sheet in the controversy over infanticide. In this month's Journal of Medical Ethics two leading foes of abortion debate the reasonableness of arguments for infanticide.
One, the well known American legal philosopher Robert P. George, of Princeton University, describes Giublini and Minerva's argument as “moral madness”. The other, controversial Catholic theologian Charles Camosy, of Fordham University, argues that the authors make not only reasonable but strong arguments. He dismisses George's claim as “unchristian”. The debate was sparked by George's comments in the blog Mirror of Justice last year.
In his article, “Infanticide and Madness”, George appeals to a fundamental intuition that killing an unwanted newborn is evil. To argue against this intuition, is outrageous.
The infanticide debate in the Journal of Medical Ethics has garnered comments from the grand old men of infanticide, the Australian Peter Singer and the American Michael Tooley. They have been defending it for decades.
Singer and Tooley attack the "anti-abortion mindset", claiming that the irrationality of "pro-life" groups caused the aggressive reaction to the Giubilini-Minerva article. They are philosophically illiterate. Singer rather condescendingly analyses the aggression of opponents:
"Their problem, apparently, is that most of them do not know how to argue against anyone who agrees with them that the fetus and newborn infant have the same moral status, but then denies that merely existing as an innocent living human being is enough to give a being a right to life."
Similarly, Tooley regards most people who disagree with his views as irrational:
“After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, was merely an infanticide thought-experiment. The special issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics includes a contribution from a paediatrician who actually has done it. Dr Eduard Verhagen, a paediatrician at University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands, says that, in his experience, infanticide is sometimes preferable to second-trimestre abortion.
The so-called Groningen Protocol (GP) in the Netherlands allows euthanasia of newborns under strict conditions if there is “hopeless and unbearable suffering” and both parents give “informed consent”. Dr Verhagen claims that there were fewer instances of newborn euthanasia after the publication of the GP – but for reasons not connected with it. With more prenatal screening, more women opted for terminations of pregnancy in difficult cases like spinal bifida. The number of newborn euthanasia cases actually fell from 15 in 2005 to 2 in 2010.
Of course, bioethicists writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics are not the only people who have suffered for their views on abortion. A new Australian university group, Life Choice, has struggled to get approved because of its opposition to abortion.
Life Choice’s aims are “to promote the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, through reasonable and informed discussion on the issues of abortion and euthanasia in Australian society."
But it has faced fierce opposition at the major universities in Sydney. The group was almost disaffiliated by the University of Sydney Union. The president of the Student Representative Council declared that "a woman's right to chose comes before freedom of speech". For similar reasons the student union at the University of NSW refused to endorse the society.
Five people have been convicted of organ trafficking in Kosovo by the European Union court which runs the legal system in the quasi-independent territory. The controversial case ended with a jail term of 8 years for a prominent urologist in Pristina, Lutfi Dervishi, for "organised crime and human trafficking".
His son Arban was sentenced to seven years and three months. The other three received terms of between one and three years. EU prosecutors hope to charge 8 more suspects with organ trafficking.
The charges all relate to transplants done in 2008. The donors were recruited from eastern European and Central Asian countries with fees of about 15,000 Euros. The recipients, mostly Israelis, paid 100,000 Euros. The donors "were cast adrift after the removal of organs without proper medical care or any medical attention, like waste," EU prosecutor Johnathan Ratel told the media.
This is not the way the era of assisted reproduction was supposed to work. An unnamed woman in the UK has been jailed for five years after artificially inseminating her 14-year-old adopted daughter in order to get another child.
The harrowing case came to light after the secretive Court of Protection released a judgement by Mr Justice Jackson. He said that he had "an abiding sense of disbelief that a parent could behave in such a wicked and selfish way towards a vulnerable child".
The case came to light when the 48-year-old mother behaved strangely in the hospital after her daughter had given birth. She tried to prevent her from breastfeeding, saying, "we don't want any of that attachment thing". The staff noticed how reluctant the daughter was to hand the baby to her mother and when she attempted to remove the baby from the ward…
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Here’s the bioethical angle on the Boston Marathon bombing: should the brain of Tamerlan Tsarnaev be autopsied to see if boxing-induced brain trauma was responsible for the violence? Experts in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at Boston University believe that it could have been a significant factor, if not the only one, in sparking the atrocity. “I hope to God they do the special testing,” said Dr. Robert Cantu, a clinical professor of neurosurgery.
Among the effects of CTE are emotional instability and lack of impulse control. Media accounts of Tsarnaev’s life suggest that his personality changed radically in the last few years. Dr Cantu and his colleague, Dr Robert Stern, who run the Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy at BU, were careful to stress that it was unlikely that his personality change, leading to a complex, highly planned operation like the bombing was the result of CTE. However, an autopsy…
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As Boston grieves after recent terrorist attack, charity workers have flown in “comfort dogs” to console residents. The Lutheran Church Charities Comfort Dogs are a team of canines that “sense the sadness” of people and work on cheering them up. “People talk to dogs -- They are like furry consolers,” said Tim Hetzner, president of the charity.
These comfort dogs are a good example of what doctors call Emotional Support Animals (ESAs). ESAs are a novel psychological therapy. Doctors prescribe them for patients suffering from depression and social withdrawal in the belief that the unconditional affection of the pet can ameliorate the effects of these illness. And in some countries, such as the US, the law exempts ESAs from standard domestic pet regulations.
Two IVF stories from opposite ends of the globe are a sobering reminder that “foetal reduction” remains a failsafe position in clinical practice. In the UK, Sharon Turner gave birth to quadruplets last month -- two sets of identical twins – a one in 70 million occurrence. She and her husband Julian were married in 2007 and turned to IVF after they failed to have children. She became pregnant on her fourth attempt – luckily, because the couple had spent 40,000 pounds, all their savings, on the IVF cycles.
News of the quads came as a shock, but the Turners were delighted. But specialists at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford warned that there were dangers in the birth. Mrs Turner told the Daily Mail: “They gave us three options: get rid of all of them, get rid of two of them or keep them. There was…
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Prominent British writer and producer Samantha Brick has spoken of her devastating experience with IVF in a recent column in the Daily Mail. The article sparked hundreds of comments - some very supportive, most extremely critical.
Brick, a 43-year-old twice-married journalist, has for the last two years been attempting to fall pregnant via IVF. It has been an extremely traumatic time. Commenting on the death of IVF pioneer Robert Edwards, Brick says she never knew what IVF involved:
Irrational as it might sound… I see this eminent professor as unwittingly responsible for the agony I have endured since discovering, four years ago, that my husband and I are unable to conceive a child together naturally.
"If IVF didn’t exist, I believe we would have, eventually, got on with our lives. Instead, we submitted ourselves to the rollercoaster of fertility treatment. And our world has been on hold, in a terrible emotional limbo,…
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The infanticide debate in the Journal of Medical Ethics has garnered comments from the grand old men of infanticide, the Australian Peter Singer and the American Michael Tooley. They have been defending it for decades.
As Boston grieves after recent terrorist attack, 
Brick, a 43-year-old twice-married journalist, has for the last two years been attempting to fall pregnant via IVF. It has been an extremely traumatic time. Commenting on the death of IVF pioneer Robert Edwards, Brick says she never knew what IVF involved:
