My first thought was, can they be serious? In the cold language of a medical abstract, two Australian academics write an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” — and expect it will merely trigger some high-tonedback-and-forth among medical ethicists.

[Mary C. Curtis, Washington Post, Mar 5, 2012] “We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk,” the article reads. “We propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion,’ rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.” Continue lendo →