I have a column in the NRO today, warning that infanticide promotion is no longer limited to the Peter Singers of the world but is becoming an Establishment project. And that is very bad news for profoundly disabled and catastrophically ill babies.
Here is the heart of the piece: Arguments about infanticide as necessary to alleviate suffering, I opine, “are really a veneer for the real issues, which are money and commitment. Disabled infants are expensive to care for, particularly if they don’t die young, and they require all sorts of attention. The nub of the issue isn’t about our supposed inability to alleviate the suffering of infants—a false supposition—but rather, about our not wanting to spend the financial and emotional resources it would take to do so.”
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things, once said famously and accurately, “Thousands of ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptional.” We see that process unfolding right in front of our very noses in the infanticide controversy.
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