From Abortion to Infanticide to All of Us

By: Dr. John G. Weldon; ©2012

I had just finished writing a brief article on abortion, documenting that we Americans have murdered some 40 times as many of our own children (in the womb), as have died in all US wars throughout American history. (That’s like having Argentina, Canada, or Spain simply disappear.) However, I had forgotten to mention the logical extension of abortion – infanticide, the murdering of babies after birth.

Introduction

I had just finished writing a brief article on abortion, documenting that we Americans have murdered some 40 times as many of our own children (in the womb), as have died in all US wars throughout American history. (That’s like having Argentina, Canada, or Spain simply disappear.) However, I had forgotten to mention the logical extension of abortion – infanticide, the murdering of babies after birth. The very next day I encountered an article advocating infanticide in nothing less than the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Murdering Newborns

Here is the abstract from the Journal of Medical Ethics, one of over 40 medical journals published by the BMJ Group, the prestigious flagship being the British Medical Journal.^[1] The article was first published online February 23, 2012.

Even the title of the article is horrific: “Afterbirth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” Indeed, why the euphemism of “afterbirth abortion”? Why weren’t the authors frank enough to tell the truth –– perhaps because there remains a hopeful remnant of conscience lurking somewhere?

The accurate title of the article is this: “Murdering Newborn Children – Why Should the Baby Live?” The only difference between the original title and this one involves a subjective determination of who is or isn’t fit to live determined by the perceived interests of the parents and society. Abortion is considered medically, psychologically and/or socially therapeutic and therefore supposedly justified. And now, so it’s argued, is infanticide.

The article is authored by Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne.

They bring shame to their nation and university, if any shame remains in a post-modern (relativistic) world. This article powerfully illustrates where secularism and relativism have logically taken us.

Article Extract & Conclusion

Here is their argument as given in their extract from the full article: “Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”^[2]

The authors conclude their article as follows: “If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the infant and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.”^[3]

Take Your Time

Even more striking (assuming that were possible) the authors also conclude by declaring that “we do not put forward any claim about the moment at which after-birth abortion [murdering babies outside the womb] would no longer be permissible [they suggest only a few days would be necessary, however…] In cases where the after-birth abortion [murdering babies outside the womb] were requested for non-medical reasons, we do not suggest any threshold,…”^[4] (Emphasis added.)

In other words, we are not just murdering our children in their own wombs now, very special and intricate places of protection created by God Himself – but today we are asked to murder our newly born children merely for social convenience. And the parents (and of course, as the article points out, the psychologists) have as much time as they require to make a decision as to the literal life or death fate of their own newly born child: “… if economical, social or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone, then people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.”^[5]

More Justification

Perhaps the greatest sin is not that this open murder of newborn children should be advocated in a journal of medical ethics – but then, in the face of the cogent criticism and moral outrage, to have the article proactively defended by the Editor of the Journal: “As Editor of the Journal, I would like to defend its publication. The arguments presented, in fact, are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly in the academic literature and public fora by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris in defence of infanticide, which the authors call after-birth abortion…. The paper also draws attention to the fact that infanticide is practised in the Netherlands.”^[6]

As the editor of the journal further maintained: “The authors provocatively argue that there is no moral difference between a fetus and a newborn. Their capacities are relevantly similar. If abortion is permissible, infanticide should be permissible.”^[7]

Unfortunately, one cannot argue with the logic if one accepts the premise: because abortion is permissible, killing newborns is permissible. How different is a child one week from delivery versus one week after delivery? If we deny it life, relevance and personhood in the earlier case, how can we deny it life, relevance and personhood after it is born?

The sad part is that no one promoting abortion and infanticide wants to recognize that the premise is medically, scientifically, biblically, morally, ethically and logically flawed (demonstrably false^[8]) – not to mention abhorrent.

As many scientific and medical texts have proven, from the point of conception human life exists (by definition, biologically, it couldn’t be anything else) and it is also a biblical and legal fact the pre-born must be considered a human person with all rights inherently assigned to human persons by God in that they are created in His image (Genesis 1:26-27) and He is the one who formed them in the womb (Psalm 139).^[9]

From Babies to You & Me

The editor’s reply is also significant because it illustrates what pro-life proponents have argued all along – that one day legalized abortion would lead to infanticide – and in fact, infanticide is already occurring in various places, quietly and unpublicized. Pro-life proponents further argued that infanticide would one day logically lead to the killing of the disabled and elderly adults who were also “inconvenient” for society (perhaps an economic burden) – and then just as logically to the killing of anyone in society who is deemed inconvenient by those in power, which places us back in Nazi Germany and similar atrocities of ancient or modern societies.

So potentially, it gets worse. Given secularism and relativism, can anyone make a logically convincing argument why after infants that other socially difficult or undesirable persons—the disabled, elderly, those spouting “hate speech” or anyone else whom those in power might deem irrelevant, unfit or dangerous—shouldn’t also be permanently terminated? Of course, at that point, it’s not just babies that are being murdered; it’s potentially anyone and everyone.

Disabled and disliked, elderly and abandoned, prisoners of crime and conscience, Jews and Christians, nosy reporters and Hollywood elites alike – at some point in the future, we all are on notice. How much safer and simpler had we simply kept abortion illegal.

We shouldn’t think it could never happen in the enlightened West, not when our enlightenment has become so terribly darkened spiritually. In the 13th Century during the Mongol conquests by Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 40 million civilians died. Khan’s method of attacking cities was so unconscionably vicious, his name is forever stained with unbridled barbarism.

Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Genghis Khan and other butchers of history, were responsible for the deaths of perhaps 300 million people^[10]– but three times as many millions have been slaughtered in the womb in just the last generation alone. We so easily murder children within their own mothers, why should anyone believe it unthinkable that an “enlightened” Western society could never achieve much greater and more open slaughter?

All it takes is secularism, relativism and the will of those in power – those who have abandoned all the moral absolutes that would prohibit another Nazi Germany or its equivalent. Along with much else, it illustrates how the West has degenerated from its precious Christian heritage to literal barbarianism.

Artistic Masterpieces: Dust v. Souls

No reasonable person would consider taking a sledgehammer or knife to the greatest works of art – the paintings and sculptures which we artistically reverence – those masterpieces by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, da Vinci, Monet, Rodin and others. Imagine slashing the Mona Lisa to shreds with a butcher knife or taking a machine gun to the Sistine Chapel! Just imagine the worldwide outrage. (It even happened when the Taliban Muslim radicals destroyed a giant Buddhist idol in Afghanistan.)

As great as these classic masterpieces are (I’m not speaking of the Buddhist idol), they are still temporal things destined to turn to dust. Everyone understands they will one day decay beyond preservation. In stark contrast, children are anything but temporal dust; they are eternal things, eternal souls precisely because they are created in God’s image. And yet we treat them with less deference and respect than we do works of art destined for destruction? Treating children as dust to be swept away is a logical result of the scientific nonsense^[11] known as evolutionary theory. Why? Given this materialistic worldview, it’s ultimately what they (and we) truly are. So somehow perhaps it’s not surprising that we choose to destroy our own children merely because it is convenient for us to do so. Or people who get in the way. Oh, how that rejection of life for “choice” has come back to haunt us.

Thus, indescribably worse devastation than destroying artistic masterpieces is achieved every day all over the world by physicians who cruelly and torturously annihilate the infinitely more beautiful masterpieces that God has created within the womb – to the tune of around one billion murdered preborn children in the last 40 years.^[12]

God’s Tears: When God Weeps

If I, a sinful, finite and fallen creature, can feel abject horror at this state of affairs, I can only imagine the horror an infinitely holy and righteous God must feel – and the pain it must bring Him. As He spoke in another context, “my eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears…” (Jeremiah 13:17).^[13] When Jesus, God incarnate, looked out upon an unrepentant Jerusalem whom He had desired to comfort, knowing the terrible destruction that would ensue under the cruel hand of the Roman army less than a generation later, he openly wept (Luke 19:41); He also wept at the death of Lazarus (John 11:35) and all the consequences of the sin that caused it.

If Jesus wept at the death of just one of His friends, imagine the weeping, so to speak, at the death of a billion children.

Hypocritic Oaths

Although doctors are not required to take ethical oaths today, most of them apparently do, in some variation of the Hippocratic oath or modern versions. In a widely used modern edition constructed by Dr. Louis Lasagna in 1964, this supposedly sacred oath reads at one point:

“Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death…. Above all, I must not play at [being] God.”^[14]

Yet that is precisely what many in the modern medical profession have done – acted as God, murdering His own children. Do they really think God doesn’t notice? It’s as if God were speaking to the abortionist MDs today: “You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to the idols” (Ezekiel 16:21). What idols? Take your pick: money, self, social convention and convenience, medical philosophy, so-called ethics, evolutionary advancement — the list is almost endless because an idol is anything that rightfully takes the place of God and His will in our lives. Whether babies are sacrificed on the altar of the ancient evil deity Baal or upon the altar of the modern abortion table, the end result is the same.

It seems, perhaps, even more hypocritical than more ironic that some physicians who swear to uphold ethical oaths will, in the name of ethics, routinely murder pre-born children and that a subset of this group will not only accept the call for the murder of newborn babies, but will actually perform the deed — and that editors of medical journals of ethics will openly defend such barbaric ideas and practices.

The End Result Is the Same – Divine Judgment

In the Old Testament, certain things were guaranteed to bring about divine judgment – worshiping false gods, killing babies and children, turning from the Lord, injustice, and similar items were the cause of divine judgment. Despite God’s almost unending mercy, He eventually got to the point where he said “I am weary of relenting” and “every one of you follows his stubborn, evil will, refusing to listen to me” (Jeremiah 15:6; 16:12).

America and the West today are filled with such things as worshiping false gods, killing babies, turning from the Lord and injustice. (For example, in today’s spiritual supermarket, many people in the West worship a false god; their religions and gods are not biblical, but religions and gods of their own preference or invention.)

As a result of all this (false gods, killing babies, turning from the Lord, injustice, and more), it’s hardly surprising that many books and articles now exist on the issue of God’s judging America and the West. Many of them observe that, in the sense of Romans 1, an indirect divine judgment has been taking place for some time, where God increasingly permits us to suffer the consequences of our sins without graciously intervening to spare us.

But, because of our unrepentant hearts, many of these books and articles also point out that that we are seemingly headed toward a much severer form of divine judgment – divine wrath and sustained national calamity, even as happened to ancient Judah in the Babylonian judgment, the story of which is openly and frightfully displayed – so very powerfully – in the book of Jeremiah. Consider a few short versus, Jeremiah 19:4-12:

For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned sacrifices in it to gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.

“‘In this place I will ruin the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who seek their lives, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth. I will devastate this city and make it an object of scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives.’

“Then [Jeremiah] break the jar while those who go with you are watching, and say to them, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. This is what I will do to this place and to those who live here, declares the Lord.

It may do us all good to remember that God has His limits – limits beyond which He will not be pushed, beyond which His own justice will not allow His mercy to be pressed.

“Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine and plague” (Jeremiah 14:12).

“When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood;…” (Isaiah 1:15)

Although there are many similar biblical scriptures, I’m also reminded of a particularly apt declaration from the apocryphal literature which, although not Scripture, still speaks volumes. But perhaps because it’s not Scripture, those who reject Scripture might somehow listen to its warnings, as if it might be speaking for God:

“You have abandoned me; now I will abandon you. I won’t have pity on you, not even when you beg for it. I will no longer listen to your prayers. Your hands are stained with blood, because you are always eager to murder someone. You haven’t just turned against me – you’ve turned against yourselves. I, the Lord, have spoken.” (2 Esrdas 1: 25-27, CEV)

No one knows if we have reached the point of no return. While there is still time to repent and turn to the Lord for forgiveness, let those who murder children and those who advocate it listen, listen carefully and consider their ways.

Perhaps most ironically of all, as with ancient Judah, even today many don’t understand what they have done: “When you [the prophet Jeremiah] tell these people all this and they ask you, ‘Why has the Lord decreed such a great disaster against us? What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the Lord our God?’ then say to them, ‘It is because your fathers forsook me,’ declares the Lord, ‘and followed other gods and served and worshiped them. They forsook me and did not keep my law. But you have behaved more wickedly than your fathers…” (Jeremiah 16:10-12).

May God help us all.

Those who have stayed with us this far are the privileged who were never aborted. They have been given the gift of life. Amazingly, there is a much greater gift available, a free gift of eternal life with an infinitely perfect God whose love is also literally infinite – a gift achieved at an unspeakable cost borne by the divine Son of God, Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross for our sins that we might not have to bear their consequences eternally. We only need turn from our sins to Him, committing our lives to Him, to guarantee eternal life forever. As Jesus said, “Truly, truly I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life” (John 6:47) because “… God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

If you desire to know more about becoming a Christian or growing in the Christian life, please see the articles on the homepage at JAshow.org.

Notes

1. ↑ “BMJ Journals,” BMJ Group; http://group.bmj.com/products/journals
2. ↑ Alberto Giubilini, Francesca Minerva, “Afterbirth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” Journal of Medical Ethics, February 23, 2012;
3. ↑ Ibid.
4. ↑ Ibid.
5. ↑ Ibid.
6. ↑ “‘Liberals Are Disgusting’: In Defense of the Publication of ‘After-Birth Abortion'” Journal of Medical Ethics Blog, February 28, 2012; http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2012/02/28/liberals-are-disgusting-in-defence-of-the-publication-of-after-birth-abortion/
7. ↑ Ibid.
8. ↑ See my article on abortion at JAshow.org and its recommended reading.
9. ↑ John Ankerberg, John Weldon, When Does Life Begin? And 39 Other Tough Questions about Abortion; see also the materials at: JAshow.org, including excerpts from his book.
10. ↑ E.g., Piero Scaruffi, “1900-2000: A Century of Genocides”; http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A History of Genocide.
11. ↑ See my Darwin’s Leap of Faith. For example, it is both a rejection of common sense and scientific facts to teach that chance (a non-entity) and absolute nothingness produced everything that exists. That’s nonsense, not science.
12. ↑ See note 8
13. ↑ For a related study see Joni Eareckson Tada, When God Weeps : Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty
14. ↑ “Hippocratic Oath”; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath