Peter Singer, who served as professor of bioethics at Princeton University from 1999 until 2004, has been hailed by The New York Times as the world’s most influential living philosopher. This “ethicist” has publicly argued that parents should have a right to murder their children 28 days after birth.
When asked, “Would you kill a disabled baby?” Singer responded,
Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion. One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that—from the point of view of ethics rather than the law—there is no sharp distinction between the fetus and the newborn baby.
Abortion Double Standard
The beliefs of Peter Singer may be repulsive, but at least they are consistent. There is no sharp distinction between the fetus and the newborn baby. Singer’s view throws light on our cultural double standard. Many people shrug at the issue of abortion, then act horrified when a mother treats her newborn baby like worthless garbage. Who could forget the story of 18-year-old Melissa Drexler, who served three years in prison after throwing her newborn baby in a trash can at her high school prom? During her trial, she confessed:
I went to the prom and I went into the bathroom and delivered the baby. The baby was born alive. I knowingly took the baby out of the toilet and wrapped a series of garbage bags around the baby…. I was aware of what I was doing at the time when I placed the baby in the bag. And I was further aware that what I did would most certainly result in the death of the baby.
When D. James Kennedy called abortion “The American Holocaust,” he was not exaggerating in the least.
Why is the story of this baby’s death any more appalling than the tens of millions of unborn children who have been dismembered, burned, stabbed, decapitated, and thrown into trash bins? Are these lives any less precious, simply because they were snuffed out inside of their mothers’ wombs? According to our courts, the answer is yes.
Elizabeth Ehlert gave birth to a six-pound, 19-inch baby girl, wrapped her in a plastic bag, and threw the newborn into a canal behind her house. Her fiancé told police that he heard the baby cry after the delivery, and medical experts testified that they suspected drowning to be the cause of death. Consequently, Ehlert was convicted of murder.
Tortured Logic
However, an Illinois appellate court overturned the conviction—explaining that the law could not consider the baby to be legally “alive” if the umbilical cord had not yet been cut at the time of her death. Thus, the court ruled that the death “may have occurred before complete separation from the mother, and therefore it is not sufficient to prove livebirth.” In other words, a crying baby has no rights—and is not legally alive—until its umbilical cord has been completely detached from the mother.
In a culture that fails to treasure life, such tortured semantics are offered in a pathetic attempt to justify the most callous of evils. Modern historians ponder how the German people could have allowed the Holocaust to occur right under their noses. Former German President Richard von Weizsaecker, who lived through the Holocaust era, confessed:
There were many ways of not burdening one’s conscience, of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum. When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.
Americans can no longer plead ignorance. If our nation is ever to be seen as a beacon of virtue in an increasingly dark world, we must not sit idly by and ignore the violent slaughter of millions of unborn children. We must treasure life from conception to natural death.
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