And I need someone to explain to me why a late-term abortion is legal if the procedure goes well but if it is "botched" and the baby is born alive it is infanticide to cut the back of its neck with scissors?
Because our legal system, like all others in the world, implictly treats physical separation from the mother's body i.e. birth as grounds for the granting of basic rights as a separate and distinct individual before the state.
Obviously it isn't
necessary to formally ascribe rights to some earlier stage in order to restrict abortions. Several Western European countries, for example, permit abortion without restrictions through the first trimester or first 4 months, after which it's illegal save for medical necessity as verified by a doctor...and they resolved all this without decades-long epic battles over "personhood," "consciousness," "ensoulment" etc. It's partly our exceptional commitment to individualism that gets us into trouble.
Has there been an upswing in infanticides -- or even murder -- since Roe v Wade?
Infanticide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the United States the infanticide rate during the first hour of life dropped from 1.41 per 100,000 during 1963 to 1972 to 0.44 per 100,000 for 1974 to 1983; the rates during the first month of life also declined, whereas those for older infants rose during this time.[105] The legalization of abortion, which was completed in 1973, was the most important factor in the decline in neonatal mortality during the period from 1964 to 1977, according to a study by economists associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.[106]
The OP-linked article is an academic position paper from two Italian bioethics postdocs, and their topic--active non-voluntary euthanasia, never mind what they call it--is a longstanding debate topic in bioethics (as are voluntary and involuntary euthanasia). Passive non-voluntary euthanasia (the withdrawal of life support from patients unable to consent) is legal under certain narrow circumstances in numerous countries, including the US; active non-voluntary euthanasia isn't legal anywhere, though the Netherlands will waive prosecution of doctors who euthanize infants under very narrow circumstances defined in protocols developed and ratified by the Dutch National Association of Pediatricians. (Note, BTW, that third-trimester abortions are NOT legal in the Netherlands and that the aforementioned protocols grew out of that country's longstanding internal dialogue on voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia, NOT its internal dialogue on abortion policy.) Clearly, the OP paper is far more radical than this, since it dismisses internationally standard assumptions about infants as rights-bearing subjects of law, arguing that all qualifications concerning the permissibility of infant euthanasia are thus "morally irrelevant."
That could certainly be criticized as (among other things) slippery-slope
thinking, since as Pearl pointed out, it relies on arbitrary, intangible distinctions which could be applied to older children as well. But like PFan said, this isn't a real-world slippery slope; it's not a policy document, and the only reason it's attracted mass media attention (and attendant death threats for the authors) is because it uses what even its authors admit is the "oxymoron" "after-birth abortion." The reason I compared that upthread to "calling smothering someone to death 'withdrawl of life support' " was to underline the stupidity of conflating ethical debates which are kept separate for good reason, regardless of whether one personally believes both acts to always be wrong. The defining problem of the abortion debate is that granting rights to fetuses would inherently undermine the liberty of the person already granted to an existing category of legal subjects: women. Nothing like that circumstance pertains in the debates over the various forms of euthanasia.
To be honest, the guys that come on here and write as if they're submitting an essay come off as so desperate to be taken seriously, they're a joke.
I don't think I like the way you looked at me when you said that.