Australian ethicist Dr Peter Singer​'s views are "harmful" to those with disabilities, the activists say.

Singer​ is back in Auckland for a one-off event at Trusts Arena in Henderson on Saturday night.

He was originally booked to speak two years ago, but the pandemic led to the event being cancelled.

The 2020 event also courted some negative attention from disability rights activists. Once the initial venue SkyCity learned of this, it cancelled Singer's booking.

Singer is known to have advocated for parents of newborns with severe disabilities to have the right to euthanise the child.

Disabled Persons Assembly NZ's Emily Tilley (pictured)​, is one of many who says Singer's views are dangerous.

Singer's views are "offensive to disabled people" says Tilley. She's unhappy to hear he's come to New Zealand to speak.

The idea of euthanising disabled people is based on a false premise, she says.

"It is based on the inaccurate premise that disabled peoples' lives are not as ‘happy' as the lives of non-disabled people," Tilley says.

Journalist and former human rights commissioner Robyn Hunt​ agrees.

Singer's stance was "devaluing", she says. But while she disagrees with his point of view, she supports Singer's right to free speech.

Like Tilley, she's nonetheless disappointed he's been given a platform in New Zealand.

Singer has confirmed he supports the idea of infanticide in certain circumstances.

That view is totally distinct from his views about the rights of disabled people more generally, he says.

"I fully stand by the rights of people with disabilities to have the best possible life that they can, to be fully integrated into society. I support the laws against discrimination against people with disabilities," he says.

Suzi Jamil​, the director of Think Inc, the company promoting Singer's tour, is standing by her decision to promote Singer.

She is inviting those who oppose his views to come to the show. They may participate in a question and answer session, she says.

Singer's current tour is to promote his non-profit organisation The Life You Can Save. It is dedicated to persuading people to donate to life-saving charities in developing nations.

Source

• Stuff

But instead, it clearly appears that more often than not, Catholics - much like the general public - make important decisions on who to vote for, and where to come down on crucial issues, based primarily on the political party they affiliate with and from their cultural, economic and political leanings as being either conservative or liberal.

Putting faith on the back burner is not Christocentric, and is not Catholic.

And so when it comes to the life and death issues facing billions of suffering brothers and sisters - born and unborn, in one's nation, as well as in all other countries - Catholics for the most part, don't look, sound or act much different than the larger secular population. And that's not good.

But in the Gospel, Jesus puts forth to his followers this challenging directive: "You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house."

In a world that is so often darkened by what Pope Francis calls the "culture of indifference," we, the modern-day followers of Jesus, like his ancient followers, are called to radiate the Master's light of love upon the various sufferings of countless brothers and sisters.

But we are taking this mandate too lightly - in a fractured and partial way.

In general, I have long found that very often Catholics with conservative leanings, more or less oppose abortion, infanticide, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, promiscuous public school sex education and government attacks on religious liberty and traditional marriage.

And in general, I have long found that very often Catholics with liberal leanings, more or less support nonviolent peace initiatives, demilitarization, drastically cutting military budgets and redirecting those funds to end global hunger and poverty, protecting the environment while working to end human-induced climate change, abolishing capital punishment, welcoming migrants and refugees, opposing racism, and fighting to stop human trafficking.

Each of these efforts is morally commendable - to a point.

But the problem is that when it comes to conservative Catholic social action initiatives and liberal Catholic social action initiatives, it most often boils down to "never the twain shall meet."

And this is disastrous - disastrous for our Catholic faith and for all who will continue to suffer because we prefer biased, ideological, narrow-minded tunnel vision to open-minded, heartfelt Catholic dialogue that places the Gospel and Catholic social teaching as our foundation.

Catholic conservatives and Catholic liberals desperately need to pray and take concrete steps in forging a unity designed to work together to develop holistic nonviolent strategies aimed at protecting the life and dignity of every single human being from conception to natural death - with a preferential option for the poorest and most vulnerable, including our common earth-home.

Instead of ranking the life issues, we need to link them, always bearing in mind that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Thus, all the life-links need to be strong!

Imagine what a moral, political, economic, cultural and religious beacon of light the Catholic Church would be if conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics would come together, in a determined way to learn from each other, to pray together and to work together with Christocentric passion building Pope Francis' "culture of encounter" where all life is respected, protected and nurtured!

• Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated Catholic social justice and peace columnist. He is available to speak at diocesan or parish gatherings. Tony can be reached at tmag6@comcast.net.

A poll of healthcare professionals in Flanders, Belgium found 93.6% of physicians surveyed "agree that in the event of a serious (non-lethal) neonatal condition, administering drugs with the explicit intention to end neonatal life is acceptable."

While the term ‘serious (non-lethal) neonatal condition' is not defined in the paper, similarly unrestrictive wording in the UK Abortion Act has in practice allowed for abortion right up to birth for babies prenatally diagnosed with a disability - including Down's syndrome, cleft lip and club foot.

Medical ‘ethicists' call for after-birth abortion

In 2012, two medical ‘ethicists' controversially claimed that doctors should be allowed to end the lives of the disabled, and even unwanted, newborn babies because they are not "actual persons".

In an article, published by the British Medical Journal, Francesca Minerva and Alberto Guibilini argue that parents should be given the choice to end the lives of their newborn babies shortly after they are born because they are "morally irrelevant" and have "no moral right to life."

In addition, the ‘ethicists' argued that infanticide - the purposeful causing of a baby's death - is no different to abortion since both a foetus and a newborn baby are only "potential persons".

They suggest infanticide, which they term as after-birth abortion, should even be permissible where a baby is perfectly healthy if the birth is unwanted, inconvenient or too expensive for the parents.

The authors state: "Both a foetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a person in the sense of subject of a moral right to life."

They add: "What we call after-birth abortion should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled".

The response to the article was widespread outrage and even death threats aimed at the articles two authors. However, what was widely condemned, at the time, now appears to have widespread support among healthcare professionals surveyed in Belgium. Continue reading

Hospitals regularly force late-term abortions on Uyghur women and kill newborn Uyghur babies, says Hasiyet Abdulla, who presently lives in Turkey.

Abdulla is one of many Uyghurs who have fled to Turkey.

She says hospital maternity wards in Xinjiang strictly enforce family planning laws, including limiting Uyghurs (an ethnic minority group in China), to three children in rural areas or two in urban regions.

Uyghur women must also wait a certain number of years between births.

"The regulations were so strict: there had to be three or four years between children. There were babies born at nine months who we killed after inducing labour. They did that in the maternity wards, because those were the orders," Abdulla says.

She says in many cases, babies born alive were removed from their parents, killed and then disposed of.

This practice stems from "an order that's been given from above," says Abdulla.

Hospitals found to have been in violation of these policies are subjected to fines or other punishments.

The claims of Uyghurs' late-term abortions and infanticide follow recent revelations that Chinese authorities have been forcibly sterilising ethnic minorities.

A report on 29 June from Associated Press says women are imprisoned for the crime of having too many children and women held in internment camps are frequently checked for pregnancy.

In some cases, women are forcibly implanted with an intrauterine device to prevent future pregnancies.

"It's not an immediate, shocking, mass-killing-on-the-spot-type genocide, but it's a slow, painful, creeping genocide," Dr. Joanne Smith Finley, a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, says.

She says the programme is a "direct means of genetically reducing the Uyghur population."

The birth rate in the province has dropped considerably since the implementation of forced abortion and infanticide and other family-planning practices.

Between one- and 1.8-million Uyghurs are estimated to be in detention camps set up by Chinese authorities, for "re-education" purposes.

Survivors report indoctrination, beatings, forced labour and torture in the camps.

Wives of Uyghur men detained in the "re-education" camps have reported being forced to marry Han Chinese men. Hans are the majority ethnic group in China.

The U.S. government has sanctioned Chinese officials who are involved with the oppression of the Uyghur population.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Association for the Defense of Human Rights and Religious Freedom

About 400,000 people live in the state's 550 villages and five towns.

Some say the reason for the gender imbalance is clear.

"No girl child was born for three months in these villages. It cannot be just a coincidence. This clearly indicates female foeticide is taking place in the district. The government and the administration are not doing anything," a social worker says.

The region's district magistrate, Ashish Chauhan, says the matter is "suspicious, and has highlighted female foeticide."

"We have identified areas where the number of girl childbirths is zero or in single-digit numbers. We are monitoring these areas to find out what is affecting the ratio. A detailed survey and study will be conducted to identify the reason behind it," Chauhan says.

He says health workers in the area have been told to be vigilant.

Whether girl babies have been particularly targeted in the region is not yet clear.

Reports also say while 216 boys and no girls were born in the 132 villages between April and June, officials found 180 girls and no boys were born during the same period in 129 different villages.

Furthermore, 88 girls and 78 boys were born in another 166 villages in the region.

Overall 961 live births were recorded in Uttarkashi between April and June.

A total of 479 were girls, while 468 were boys (the rest were possibly stillborn).

This, officials say, corresponds with the district's favourable sex ratio of 1,024 women for 1,000 men, higher than the national average of 933 women per 1,000 men.

Officials say the media possibly cherry-picked the birth data collected by volunteer health workers.

"I feel media reports about the no-girl villages have been misinterpreted. Also, there is not enough understanding of the context. We've ordered an investigation anyway," senior district official Ashish Chauhan says.

A team of 26 officials is currently visiting 82 villages to check the veracity of the data and to find out whether something is wrong.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• BBC
• Image: The Socjourn

Sosefina Amoa, 26, has said she didn't know she was pregnant before she gave birth to a baby boy in her room at the Little Sisters of the Poor convent in early October.

Amoa had arrived in the United States from Samoa less than a week before delivering the child.

She acknowledged as part of a plea deal in February that after giving birth to her son she put a piece of wool clothing over his nose and mouth and applied pressure, smothering him.
Continue reading

In exchange for the plea, prosecutors agreed to argue for a sentence between four and 10 years in prison, although under District sentencing guidelines, the charge carries a maximum of 30 years.

On October 5 2013 a Samoan woman, Sosefina Amoa, 26, arrived in the United States to begin the 5 month course. She gave birth to the child on October 10.

Amoa's attorney told the judge that her client accidentally smothered her newborn son Joseph after panicking in the minutes after the baby was born.

But the assistant U.S. attorney drew a more calculating picture of Amoa. She told the judge that Amoa hatched a plan of deception to cover her pregnancy as soon as she arrived.

Source

• bbc.com
• The Washington Post
• Mail online
• Image: rotwnews.com

A coalition of feminist groups, politicians and leading doctors campaigned for the decriminalisation of the state's abortion law. The Abortion Law Reform Act was passed by the state Parliament in October 2008. Two medical ethicists have put the case for infanticide in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

In the Roman era, infanticide was routine and normal.

The spreading influence of Christianity put a stop to the practice.

In 1920, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche published their book The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life which advocated "compassionate" killing of those deemed "human ballast".

In an article in the NZ Herald, Bernard Moran says that when abortion up to birth is made legal, it is a short step to abortion after birth.

Continue reading in NZ Herald.

Image: Stuff.co.nz

Bernard Moran is the national president of Voice for Life

The United Nations estimates that as many as 200 million women and girls are missing in the world today as a result of being born into societies in which they have no value. The latest figures from China show that in some parts of the country there are as many as 130 boys for every 100 girls, a ratio that has widened rather than narrowed in the past decade. In that same period, it's estimated between 3 million to 6 million girls were aborted in India, despite the fact that sex determination tests have been outlawed there as a response to such a trend. And before you make the mistake of thinking this is due to poverty, think again - the wealthiest classes in both China and India are just as likely if not more so to dispense of their girl children because of the cultural honour of having boys.

By 2020, it's estimated that China will have around 30-40 million more men than women. Known as the 'bare branches syndrome', it describes a phenomenon in which significant proportions of the population will be unable to "bear fruit". Simply put, with no women to marry in a culture that prizes the structure of family (albeit a one-child one in China), what will those millions of men do? There's already evidence of increased trafficking of girls and women through China, while rural areas with even fewer options see wives being shared. To put this problem into a very tiny nutshell, the ritual gendercide of women and girls throughout the world has even more ramifications than the moral implications of devaluing humans according to biological sex. It is real, it's happening and it's a devastating insight into the logical endpoint of patriarchal codes that position women as property and resources rather than human beings.

So what does this have to do with Australia? Continue reading

Sources

• Clementine Ford in Daily Life
• Image: The Independent Blogs

Clementine Ford is an Australian writer with a background in feminist/social commentary.

A special issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics contains 31 commentaries on infanticide from a range of ethicists, some arguing it can be a moral action; others maintaining that even suggesting it is a vile stain on academic integrity.

Commenting on the argument that infanticide is morally no different from abortion, Christian blogger Dr Peter Saunders says "we can draw one of two conclusions from that — either we should embrace infanticide or stop doing abortions".

Continue reading

The article entitled After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva was electronically pre-published by the Journal of Medical Ethics

Catholic bioethicist John Kleinsman who is Director of The Nathaniel Centre, the New Zealand Catholic Bioethics Centre, says the prospect of deliberately killing children after birth is appalling but he agrees that if society allows abortion, there is no rational basis for forbidding the killing fo the new born.

"While I'm appalled about infanticide, I think it actually highlights, really, the problems with abortion."

"If society allows abortions then there is no logical reason to say 'no' to infanticide," he says. "This way of thinking turns children into commodities to be disposed of at will."

The editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics has defended his actions. He said that the arguments presented were are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly in the academic literature and public fora by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris.

"The novel contribution of this paper is not an argument in favour of infanticide - the paper repeats the arguments made famous by Tooley and Singer - but rather their application in consideration of maternal and family interests. The paper also draws attention to the fact that infanticide is practised in the Netherlands," he said

Read After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?

Source:

• New Zealand Catholic Bishops' Conference
• Journal of Medical Ethics Blogs
• NZ City.com
• Image: The Blaze

The article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, entitled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" states in its abstract: "After-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."

The article, written by Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan and Francesca Minerva of Melbourne University, argues that "foetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons" and consequently a law which permits abortion for certain reasons should permit infanticide on the same grounds.