When is Killing Your Baby Okay?

I had a hard time just writing the title to this article. It's being written just after I read a piece from The Telegraph titled "Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say." If these "experts" were only making a statement, I would tend to agree, being that I am pro-life and believe that life begins at conception. But that is not what they are saying.

These authors, linked to the prestigious Oxford University, are actually laying out the argument that parents should have the right to have their baby killed after he or she is born  and that this "should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” Their article was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Sadly, this is not new and I'm not surprised. The ethic espoused here was promoted by Peter Singer and others long ago. In fact, you can trace the philosophical underpinnings of their position back to some of the philosophers of the 19th century. Singer, later of Princeton University, wrote, in 1979, that “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”

It is philosophers and so-called "ethicists" like these who have been the architects of what has been called the "culture of death." While most people find their views reprehensible and morally repugnant, we don't stop long enough to think about why they believe what they believe and what they are saying about society as a whole.

We, as a society, have made the decision that children in the womb are not human, and therefore not worthy of our protection. They have simply extended that logic a little bit further, stating that “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.” What we are now seeing and hearing is the result of our selfishness being taken to its logical conclusion.

A woman is pregnant, but it's not a good time in her life to have a child, so we tell her that it's not human until it's born, so it's okay to abort. We, in Canada anyway, have extended that "right" to legal abortion up until the moment the child fully emerges from her mother's womb. We don't talk about it, we don't think about it. It's uncomfortable. Anyone trying to shed light on what abortion is really like is shouted down in the public square. Right to life groups are routinely denied permission to state their case on college campuses. It's just easier for us to say that babies in the womb are not human. We know, scientifically, that is not true; we know morally that is not true, but we choose to suppress that knowledge for the sake of a "right to choose."

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, the article's authors, have called society's bluff. They have thrown down the gauntlet, if you like. Here, in essence, is what they are saying. “We take ‘person’ to mean 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.” One of these authors has written another article promoting euthenasia, another natural step down the same road. Because we, as a society, have denied the sanctity of human life and have arbitrarily removed the barrier preventing us from taking the life of the unborn, these authors have simply picked up the barrier and moved it again.

Here's a question, who are we to say that they are wrong? On what basis do we disagree - that we simply don't like what they are saying? That's not good enough. What is it that makes human life important? Is it simply because we say so? Are people only valuable as long as they can contribute something to society?

As much as I disagree with his philosophy, I do have to recognize the honesty of atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who stated that "God is dead and we have killed him." In his Parable of the Madman and other writings he described what society would be like after we purged it of belief in God. Many of his predictions have come true. I've included a video below featuring Ravi Zacharias quoting Nietzsche's famous parable.




It was Charles Colson who said, "The 'devaluation of all values' is what the death of God has meant to politics. Dictinctions between right and wrong, justice and injustice have become meaningless. No objective guide is left to choose between 'all men are created equal' and 'the weak to the wall.'"

It is into this debate we once again declare what Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of Germany after World War II said to Billy Graham: “Outside of the resurrection of Jesus Christ I know of no other hope for mankind.” The issue is the heart. Nothing has more of a bearing on our moral choices than belief or disbelief in God. The Biblical worldview provides the foundation upon which to build, not only our individual lives, but society as well. As G.K. Chesterton rightly said, "The danger when men stop believing in God is not thaty they will believe in nothing, but that they will believe in anything."  Well - as you can see, in today's world, anything goes.

Related Articles:
Worldview - Part 1 - Origin
Worldview: Part 2 - Meaning
Worldview - Part 3 - Morality
Worldview - Part 4 - Destiny
"Gendercide" - A Deeper Look

"Gendercide" - A Deeper Look

I just read a very disturbing article by, Allison Pearson, a British journalist writing for The Telegraph. The article was following up on the same subject I posted about yesterday - the fact that girls are being aborted now in the U.K. simply based on their sex.

The article is disturbing enough based upon the fundamental facts discussed - sex-selection abortions. What was also disturbing to me was the line of reasoning followed by the writer, who can't seem to follow a logical argument. She rightly criticized this practice of killing girl foetuses because it was against the law. She called the practice "Unbelievable. Horrifying." I couldn't agree more.

But this is where Allison and I part company. She went on to declare that she was in favour of abortion in general, based apparently on the "kind of life" some of these babies would have if carried to term. She goes on to rail against those women who use abortion as a form of contraception, giving examples of many who have had multiple abortions. She also quotes this alarming stat: "Over the past 40 years, there has been a 3,700 per cent increase in abortions." (Emphasis mine)

Here's a shocker, the medical director of the largest abortion provider in the U.K. shared this statement: "I’ve had a consultant colleague in the north of England who expressed a view – that consultant was from an ethnic minority –… he didn’t think [gender selection] was ethically wrong because he thought that the cultural reason why some communities may prefer to have four male babies is as good a reason as the, if you like, Anglo-Saxon cultural view of: 'Well I’m pregnant, I just don’t want it anyway’.”


The problem with this statement by the "ethnic minority" consultant was that he's absolutely right. We in the West have lost the moral ground to defend the life of a baby girl in the womb. It brings Psalm 11:3 to mind,
"When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” What indeed?

Allison makes reference to the "slippery slope" that Western Civilization has been on but doesn't seem to recognize the fundamental issues involved. A history lesson is necessary here.

Our basic principles in the West have been based upon a Christian consensus. This is true of the U.K., most of Europe, Canada, and particularly the U.S. There was a common framework and worldview upon which to establish the role of government and even the laws by which we are governed.   

Delegates to the Charlottetown Conference

This worldview accepted the fact that there is a Creator God who is sovereign and who has established boundaries within which mankind should function in a civilized society. In Canada, our founding fathers looked to Psalm 72:8 to paint a picture of the future of the nation. Today the following words hang in the corridor near the Confederation Chamber in Province House: ‘In the hearts of the delegates who assembled in this room on September 1, 1864, was born the Dominion of Canada.  Providence being their guide, they builded better than they knew.’” 

The Us. Declaration of Independence presented, within it's preamble, the foundation for the decisions of future generations: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It was God who provided life - an inalienable right!

Over the past 50 years or so we have seen a rapid change in how we view government and its role and how we view ourselves and our rights. We have focused on individual rights versus the common good. We have "created" rights never intended by our forefathers, which have promoted selfishness and the breakdown of the family - the building block of a civilized society. We have denied that there is a role for God in culture and have therefore removed the very ground under our feet.

The result of our folly is the kind of faulty reasoning that Allison Pearson is using that says, in effect, "It's okay to kill babies in the womb, as long as you're not killing them just because they're girls." It also leaves us in the position of having to explain to those in India and China why it's wrong for them to kill their baby girls because they're girls, but it's okay for us to kill our girls or boys because it's inconvenient for us to raise children right now.

Face it, Allison, you have nowhere to stand. It's simply your opinion against theirs.

Why is sex-selection abortion wrong? It's wrong because that is a living child that is being killed, and that child has a God-given right to life. It's the same reason that abortion is wrong - period. If you deny that there is a God-given right to anything, prepare to lose your own rights, because they have no sustaining force other than the changing opinions of men.

We took the top off the bottle a long time ago and the genie doesn't want to return. This moral relativism we have been left with has given rise to organizations like NAMBLA, lobbying for the right to have sex with minors. What is our moral ground to refuse them? What about polygamy? Why can't a man have as many wives as he can support? And while we're at it, our health care system is under strain, wouldn't euthenasia take a lot of pressure off by doing away with the sick and frail? According to recent stats, 90% of all pregnancies of Down Syndrome children in the U.S. end in abortion. What if we end the lives of all children with a high likelihood of abnormality, even after they are born? After all, who are you to tell me that I should have to raise a child that I fathered? Isn't that my business, not yours?

It's a scary world when we remove an objective moral standard from the table. It was T.S. Eliot who said, "If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin." What he was saying was that in the absence of a moral consensus, it is simply survival of the fittest, and strong men rise to rule with an iron fist.

As Dostoevsky so eloquently put it: "If God is dead, then all things are possible!" Victims Against Crime, a South African organization, states that. "At least 180 million people have been killed by secular governments in the 20th Century. And that is a very conservative estimate. We are not here talking about people who have died in wars caused by secular humanist states, because that would massively increase the body count. No, over 180 million people have been killed by their own secular humanist governments in the 20th Century... More people were killed by their own governments in peace time than were killed by foreign invaders in war time."


We rightly condemned Hitler for his barbarism during World War II, in his attempted annihilation of the Jews and others, but on what basis? Was Stalin wrong to kill millions of his own people during his reign of terror? What about communist China and their strict one child policy? This has resulted in millions of cases of infanticide, little girls murdered at birth. Of course these are wrong - all of them. They are wrong because they violate God's law.

We, all of us, have been created in the image of God. Every human being has rights that have been endowed by God, rights which no-one else has the right to violate. If we do not grasp this fundamental truth, we will continue down this road which leads to the victimization of the weak and the vulnerable.

Yes, it is wrong to kill our unborn baby girls. But please, Allison, understand this. It's wrong to kill the boys too.

Related Articles: 

Words of Death: "It's A Girl!"   

Why the abortion issue won't go away

Christianity & Science

Worldview - an introduction.

The Manhattan Declaration
Following Up - The Latest News