Trying to have a serious discussion on the subject always attracts its fair share of right wing nutters.The same people if asked 'shall we continue blowing up innocent people abroad using unmanned drones would whole heartedly support the proposal'.
If you support the murder or genocide of other human beings (implicitly or explicitly) and actually contribute to it via general taxation what right right do you have to sit in judgement over other human beings and their rights to terminate the life of their child, it may be morally repugnant but then so is denying poor kids life-saving medicines and clean water in foreign countries etc, etc, and that kills millions every year.

Nigee, you didnt answer the question. You went off somewhere else. Where do you draw the line on THIS subject. If its not alright for me to shoot someone on the street for no reason, how is right to murder a child that is already born? I have my issues with abortion in general, but we continue to push the line further and further.

Wow, the experts suddenly discover that killing a baby is no different than abortion. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, in Nigee's world, someone who opposes the murder of babies qualifies as a "right wing nutter".

I thought the upper limit for abortion keeps dropping generally in the west, not really a line that is being pushed further and further. And Nigee's wrong, you don't have to be a right wing nutter to oppose abortion (in any situation), you could just be a crazed religious fanatic. Other options include an idiot or a massive dick.

The answer for me lies with the parents and if they need advice possible the medical professionals. Some parents struggle to bring up children without physical or mental challenges, why subject that child to pain, misery, neglect and suffering over a sustained period of years by forcing them to stay with parents/carers that don't want them. Although it may be hard to accept for some of these new borns a painless respectful death administered by health care professionals could be their best outcome.

So I should go shooting homeless people, since I am saving them from misery and suffering, right?

Right wing nutter indeed.

This isn't a new argument. There have always been some ethicists and philosophers who - like those opposed to abortion - don't distinguish between a fetus and newborns. The only (and very important) difference is those opposed to abortion draw the opposite conclusion. No one's pushing the line here. Some guys just wrote a paper saying something that people like them have been saying for decades.

You will not see serious pro-choice advocates claim abortion is equivalent to infanticide. That would, quite obviously, not be in their interests.

You don't have to be a right wing nutter to oppose abortion but they are attracted to issues of this nature like flies around shit, busy telling us all how to live our lives.

oh, but you want to go grab guns, but you are not telling people how to live their life? Hypocrite...lol

Not arguing either way on abortion, I will however point out just how stupid that article is. The premise of abortions is pro choice, which means that women should be able to choose what to do with their bodies and that other people have/should have no say in the matter. Pro choice doesn't exist after birth because...are you ready for this...the baby isn't in the mother anymore. So arguing that killing a baby is the same as an abortion is just ignoring the other side of the issue.

@Stressed - I don't want anyone to grab guns, the less guns grabbed the better I feel. I would like to see them stop selling bullets to any Tom, Dick or Harry though, that seems to make a lot of sense.

C'mon, Nigee, you know as well as I do that abortion is a complete none issue in the UK. Besides which a lot of our right wing nutters (including myself) when asked are in favour of it. It's our left wing nutters who are the controlling ones.

So, some "experts" say killing a born child is morally equivalent to abortion and that somehow invalidates abortion or something? Is the point of this thread that some pro-abortionists are scumbags? Because, unsurprisingly, yes. There are scumbag human rights activists, there are scumbag atheists, there are scumbags everywhere. People are supporting good causes for all the wrong reasons all the time. Welcome to the real world.

Nigee, that wont work here, because, get ready for this one. Lots of Americans can make theirown ammo (well reload old brass). so 100% useless way to get rid of that.

I asked the question, where does it STOP. The child is BORN.

@ Octavious - you, right wing? You are being way too hard on yourself, I had you down more as a BoJo fan, super-intelligent but slightly special, the sort of guy that only gets invited once to social events, especially it if involves Northerners or foreigners :-)

ulytau, this isn't even about pro-abortion activists being scumbags. The academics that wrote this paper are literally just exploring an academic question, of interest to them only because they're professional ethicists.

And their conclusion isn't surprising or interesting. We already know that, physiologically, the difference between a fetus after nine months of gestation and a newborn baby is minimal, so any theory of the right to life based on the fundamental characteristics of an entity will draw similar conclusions about both a fetus and a newborn baby.

This has almost nothing to do with abortion, which is about a woman's right to decide whether or not something gets to live inside her.

@ Stressed

Quite a few Brits do aswell. My neighbour spends many a happy afternoon making his. He has quite a collection of firearms too... Approximately 30 last time I was over there.

Not everyone can be as special as you, Nigee :)

StackelbergFollower, I wasn't saying the authors were scumbags, I asked whether the point of this thread was to promote the point that pro-abortion activists are scumbags. The ideas promoted by the authors are nothing new, so the line has already pushed there. Infanticide is already practised in the Netherlands as an extension of the euthanasia policy. Peter Singed has long argued that people in persistent vegetative state should be used in experiments instead of animals, because they have more attributes of a person that a human non-person. This is known for years, more than a decade. So, since "the line they are going to start pushing" has been actually consistently pushed for a long time already, I didn't know what Stressed was trying to argue with this thread. Now I know.

@ultyau: Ah, gotcha. Yes, I agree.

As best as I can tell, this thread is either sensational alarmism designed to dishonestly impugn pro-choice activists with academic arguments by ethicists that have been around for decades, or has been made in total ignorance by StressedLine about the prevalence of these arguments in the field of ethics today.

In some cultures it is not rare to have the mother eat the newborn - it is considered the moral thing to do when food is scarce and the mother's survival is more important because there are other children to protect (and the mother has given a lot of energy to producing this new-born, so eating it is the best way to recover this energy)

Of course this only happens in tribes which live on the edge of subsistence and have very little trade during the winter months. (usually Inuit tribes, if i'm not mistaken)

My basic response, your morals are relative.

If I learned anything from 300, it's if you're going to kill your baby because it's disabled, make sure you finish the job.

Ha ha!! Just watched 300 again...great one, abge.

Let's remove this discussion from "killing a baby" to "Killing any citizen who is no longer useful and has become a burden". For example, a child in gradeschool has been shot by a mad gunman but survived with bullet-wound to the head and neck. Child's prognosis is grim...alive, but paralyzed from the neck down and severe mental retardation.

Or make that your mother...or girl friend. Just kill them, too? It's no different than killing a baby.

One more step..no bullet wounds...just a progressively useless person, who won't/can't hold a job and lives off the generosity of other citizens without contributing any work to society - a true parasite? Kill them?

This is where these discussion lead...

My point is how can the thought by these 'experts' of killing a living breathing child even be debated on

Stressedlines, do you eat cows? fully developed adult cows?

Noone is suggesting to kill 'any citiizen who is no longer useful and has become a burden' (except, perhaps, some neo-nazis) so I don't get where this is all coming from. That said killing a living breathing child is an interesting conversation for philisophical debate.

There's some things that aren't worth trying to understand, Stressed.