Post-script to Secularism

My last post has generated a fair bit of controversy – I don’t think I’ve ever made a blog post which has attracted so many comments!

I’d just like to write a very brief postscript to that with a link to a blog post about after-birth abortion: two doctors have written in the Journal of Medical Ethics a paper entitled: “After-Birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” This is part of the abstract:

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.

In other words, once a baby has been born, it should be possible to kill it as it does not yet have any moral status as a person.

Now, this sounds like very shaky ground to me. The blog post I linked to above makes the point that once you allow for abortion, any lines you draw in the sand are essentially arbitrary. When I was writing my blog post last week, I just suggested that a secular society might lead us in a direction we didn’t want to go. I’m wondering whether this is a concrete example of what one of those directions might be.


Comments

3 responses to “Post-script to Secularism”

  1. […] is moral or immoral without deriving morality from God. He went on to mention it on his blog and also mentioned a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics called After-birth abortion: why should the […]

  2. […] are those out there today who are arguing the case for eugenics and things like infanticide, on rational grounds. Like I said before, secularism could lead us somewhere we don’t want to […]

  3. […] each of his creations equally, this kind of thing is almost to be expected. (Similarly with my previous thoughts on secularism and infanticide). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, can be done about […]

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