“At present parents can choose to keep or destroy their disabled offspring only if the disability happens to be detected during pregnancy. There is no logical basis for restricting parents’ choice to these particular disabilities.
If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant’s condition than is possible before birth.”
Practical Ethics, 2nd edition, Cambridge, 1993
In other words, parents should be allowed to kill their infant up to one month after birth.
While ghastly, the above statement is logically consistent with the belief that humans have no more dignity or worth than any other so called evolved animal. And as the founder of the animal rights movement, this is what Peter Singer believes and writes in “Practical Ethics”.
Bad ideas are weaponised when launched by a person of influence. Unfortunately, as a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University in America, Peter Singer is just that. This is yet another example of why one should spend more time on someone’s statement than their qualifications. Continue Reading →