The defence of the most vulnerable in our society has suffered a further blow as medical ‘ethicists’ have proposed the legitimisation of infanticide, a practice they prefer to present as ‘after-birth abortion.’ The killing of newborn babies is, by any religious moral code, a most heinous and terrible sin, yet writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Doctors Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva propose in their paper ‘Why should the baby live?‘ that ‘killing a newborn should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.’
Speaking from his office in the European Parliament, Nirj Deva MEP, President of the International Committee on Human Dignity, today told the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, “the true test for a society is how it protects its most vulnerable, yet increasingly in the modern age such people – whether they be newborn, the terminally ill, the elderly or the disabled – are treated as burdens to be dispensed of and eradicated. That we may now propose the legitimate killing of a newborn child demonstrates the degrading effect the practice of abortion has had on our moral conscience.”
The British MEP, who has long campaigned for the preservation of human life and dignity added, “This proposal starkly demonstrates the danger of removing all notions of morality from the political sphere. A society devoid of any sense of innate human dignity finds increasing opportunities to remove those it considers unworthy of life. Indeed, we have seen this trend in Europe, first with abortion and then euthanasia; infanticide represents the next step in the downward spiral towards a wholly secular society stripped of any belief of a God-given right to life.”
Section 1, Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights clearly states: ‘Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally.’ Furthermore, theUniversal Declaration of Human Dignity recognises human life from conception until natural death. The Dignitatis Humanae Institute notes with sadness the tragic deviation from this truth and therefore calls on all people to robustly reject any further attempts to deny the intrinsic worth of a human life.
