Oxford’s Nazi Scientists Of Today!
Article: (C) Bruce Bawer.
In my teenage years, I was a devout fan of science fiction. The stories that made me keep coming back for more were the ones that made me think, wonder, look at the world afresh, recognize connections across time and space, contemplate the nature of consciousness, and confront moral questions that I had never thought about before.
Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” and other such stories were Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God.” And Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall.” and of course, later I revered the masterly Robert Heinlein.
But there was no writer who awed me more than Philip K. Dick – and no story that had a more powerful impact on me than Dick’s “The Pre-Persons." The story takes place in a time in the near future when abortion has been redefined in such a way that parents may “abort” their children up until age twelve. A boy who is out playing in the park sees the “abortion truck” heading for some home in his neighborhood and, fearing it is coming for him, sequesters himself in some bushes until he realizes to his relief that the “abortion” victim in question is someone other than himself.
I bring all this up not out of idle nostalgia but because of an article that has just appeared in the British Medical Journal, and that I learned about through a news report in the Telegraph. The BMJ article is by two individuals named: Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
The former (photo Left) is connected with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan and with the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in Melbourne; the latter is associated with the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Both share the same job description. They are “medical ethicists.”
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| Giubilini. I love jumpy things. Now...it's only very intelligent people like me who should be entrusted to make these unsentimental decisions for society. |
The point of their article is simple. They argue for the morality of what they call “after-birth abortion” – in other words, as they bluntly put it, “killing a newborn.” They say that such killing “should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” They explain that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion” to “euthanasia” “because the best interest of the one who is killed is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice.”
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| Minerva. Your baby? Well it's hardly going to be another Mozart... |
So speak the “medical ethicists” – one of them connected with Oxford, no less. It is all very chilling – and it is all straight out of Philip K. Dick, right down to the cool, dispassionate, professional rhetoric about what does and does not constitute personhood.
Giubilini and Minerva explain that for them, the word “person” signifies “an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” Since newborns are not “persons” in this sense, their “alleged right…to develop their potentiality…is over-ridden by the interests of actual people (parents, family, society) to pursue their own well-being” – for “actual people’s well-being could be threatened by the new (even if healthy) child.”
Perhaps Giubilini and Minerva could let them grow up a bit before experimenting on them, similar to the one's performed on these children in the photo below, by some Nazi doctor.
Giubilini and Minerva – if I keep repeating their names, it’s because I want to make sure you and I remember them – who are purportedly talking here about what constitutes humanity, but their very language is the epitome of inhumanity.
Perhaps Giubilini and Minerva could let them grow up a bit before experimenting on them, similar to the one's performed on these children in the photo below, by some Nazi doctor.
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| Children subjected to medical experiments in Auschwitz. And who's once beloved children were those...? |
Nazi science: to be straightforward about it, that’s pretty much what Giubilini and Minerva are selling.
