Bozell Column: The Left's War on Babies

In the wake of the Obama administration dictate that private insurance companies cover contraceptives and abortifacients, supporters have defined anyone who would oppose this mandate as waging a “war against women.” Obviously, no opponent of this policy is actually bombing, shooting, or stabbing women to death.

The same cannot be said for what the cultural Left favors – a war against babies. The latest front of “advanced” leftist medical ethics has emerged from the experts at Oxford University. They don’t just favor abortion, even partial-birth abortion. They favor “after-birth abortion.”

It is stomach-turning stuff. Killing babies is no different than abortion, these academics argued in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Ironically, pro-lifers would agree, and have long pointed to this logical progression in the face of laughter. The “ethicists” now explain it somewhat differently. Parents should be allowed to kill their newborn babies because they’re still “morally irrelevant.”

The article carries the chilling title “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue newborn babies aren’t “actual persons” but “potential persons.”

How this qualifies as “science” or “ethics” is anyone’s guess. It qualifies as a quintessential example of the culture of death. Giubilini also gave a talk at Oxford in January titled “What is the problem with euthanasia?”

Team Oxford argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense.” They explained that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

These “ethicists” also argued that parents are somehow cheated when only “64 percent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing. Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child,” they complained.

All this should cause us to return to what Rick Santorum was trying to say – and our pro-abortion media could only scorn as politically disastrous – about amniocentesis being used as a death panel. The Santorum family’s decision to have a disabled child – as well as the Palin family’s decision – have been disdained by the liberal media as freakishly weird, dangerously religious. It’s an “alternative lifestyle” that the “compassionate” liberals cannot comprehend.

The same people who casually spew about a “war on women” have no time to discuss the “termination” of most pregnancies when disabilities like Down Syndrome are discovered. These people argue capital punishment is wrong because an innocent life may be taken. But they have no moral qualms about “parents” slaughtering their innocent but somehow subhuman babies that don’t pass prenatal tests for normalcy.

They have yet to speak about post-natal death sentences.

The same people who wouldn’t countenance talk of a “war on babies” expect the national media to continue their near-total blackout of
Barack Obama’s record advocating against a Born-Alive Infant Protection Act in Illinois in 2001, 2002, and 2003. This article out of England ought to spur reporters to ask Obama about “after-birth abortion” as a 2012 campaign issue.

How could the president who led the effort to prohibit the care of infants surviving abortion oppose those who would want to kill them a minute after birth?

There was a terrific pro-life speech delivered a month ago before the Susan B. Anthony Fund by Sen. Marco Rubio, who addressed the same “viability” argument on a moral slippery slope. To the argument that the fetus is not viable without the support of the mother, he answered “a newborn isn’t viable without the mother, either. A one-year-old child, a two-year-old child — leave a two-year-old child by himself, leave a 6-month-old child by himself, they are not viable either.”

This is why Rubio declared “The issue of life is not a political issue, nor is it a policy issue. It is a definitional issue. It is a basic core issue that every society needs to answer. The answer that you give to that issue ends up defining which kind of society you have.” You can have a society defined by sexual libertinism and abortion for convenience – or you can respect a right to life.

Rubio drew a standing ovation for concluding with this:

"There is nothing that America can give this world right now more important than to show that all life — irrespective of the circumstances of its creation, irrespective of the circumstances of its birth, irrespective of the conditions of that they find themselves in — all life, in a planet where life is increasingly not valued, in a planet where people are summarily discarded, all life is worthy of protection. All life enjoys God’s love.”

But somehow, the Left and their media allies define Rubio’s view as a “war on women” – no matter how many female babies are discarded
as medical waste.