Bioethicist Art Caplan Gets it Right About Infanticide

I have my pronounced differences with University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and media commentator, Art Caplan, particularly regarding the Schiavo case and ESCR/SCNT. But he is right about this: Over at the AJOB blog, Caplan calls the drive to legalize eugenic infanticide, “euthanasia driven by considerations of cost and lack of ‘social value.’”

Post Script: Caplan is certainly right about the reasons for promoting infanticide, but as my pal Bradford Short pointed out forcefully to me in an e-mail just now, Caplan’s use of the term “floated” is misleading. It is being pushed aggressively, not floated. Indeed, as readers of Secondhand Smoke well know, eugenic infanticide is ongoing in the Netherlands and Belgium, and will soon receive the formal sanction of Dutch law—further plummeting a country that was once a moral beacon off a vertical moral cliff.