After-Birth Abortion advocates Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva are up to new tricks. Not content with just suggesting “that life with certain pathologies is not worth living” (their own words) and should therefore be killed after birth when the opportunity to kill them in-utero has been missed; they are now discussing how best to get their message across to, and accepted by the general public.
In a paper entitled “Bioethics and the New Media” , Giubilini and Minerva explained why it was necessary for bioethecists to communicate to “non-academics” their research in everyday language. They recognized that “the political agenda in democratic countries is becoming increasingly concerned with regulation of biotechnologies, of medical practices and health-related issues which, in turn, have a deep impact on the life of people and on their choices.”
Secondly the author’s of the paper noted that
issues in bioethics deal with topics, such as life, death, the moral status of human beings (and many others) that touch upon people’s most profound and personal values. For this reason, very often ideas which go against traditional values are perceived with an immediate feeling of shock and an immediate impulse to rebut the proposal, prior to any rational, cold reflection. And the problem is that such reactions cannot be easily dismissed as a sign of irrationality of people who cannot fully appreciate the opportunities of new biotechnologies or the freedom and well-being that some medical options can promote.
Here Giubilini and Minerva recognize the natural law which is written on every person’s heart. That law which helps us see the inherent dignity in each individual person. That law which if not ignored, ensures that people live in service of each other and in the Truth. Sadly, that natural law is too often ignored. And bioethecists such as Giubilini and Minerva would like to see that natural law eradicated in people’s hearts by sugar-coating their eugenic and callous theories so as to see them come to fruition. They explain this thinking by saying
it seems that it would be a deep violation of academic freedom if bioethicists were forced not to publish the results of their research in order to avoid causing a “yuck” reaction in the public. After all, many things that used to cause a “yuck” reaction just a few years ago (like in vitro fertilization) are now considered acceptable by many people. So, at least in some cases, the “yuck” reaction seems to disappear after a while, when people learn more about a certain practice or when they come to realize that it is useful.
So the proposed method of desensitizing public opinion is
to encourage and to facilitate the translation of the bioethics language into a less specialized language, and to put more effort into providing readers with an appropriate explanation of the context in which ideas are developed as well as the state of the art of the actual debate in bioethics.
When the so-called “specialized language” of bioethics is “translated” into everyday language, bioethecists then have the opportunity to mask their full intentions to the public. They can choose to downplay things that people would find offensive or concerning and instead focus on the possibilities that they know the general public will find “useful”.
This is of particular concern to Mike Sullivan of Saving Downs. Why? Because Giubilini and Minerva promoted not so long ago infanticide of babies born with Down syndrome because they believe that people who have Down syndrome are inferior to the rest of us who are supposedly “normal”. They used the term after-birth abortion. A subtle change in language. Infanticide would produce the “yuck” reaction in people. Abortion, accepted by many in society as being a “women’s choice” and necessary, doesn’t produce quite the same “yuck” reaction.
Mike’s synopsis of Giubilini and Minerva’s proposals is telling. He says what they are really getting at is:
That it should be permissible to kill new born babies who have Down syndrome.
Yep, that’s it. Giubilini and Minerva support killing babies with Down syndrome.
And there is a problem, because the non-academics don’t agree.
And there is another problem. The Down syndrome community isn’t lying down and been rolled over.
And we can’t be readily dismissed as being irrational.
And the solution? Giubilini and Minerva want to change the way they promote this wonderful opportunity that we were denied to kill our babies after they were born. Because we were denied the freedom and well-being that we would have had with this wonderful idea they want to promote.
When Giubilini, Minerva and all the other eugenicists have succeeded in convincing people that we must at all costs eliminate people with Down syndrome from our world, who will they move onto next?