Briggs on Academics Uriging Infanticide
In the book AN EVIL GUEST Gene Wolfe sardonically predicts a culture where ‘post-natal abortions’ that is, killing the baby after he is born, would be commonplace.
As it turns out this science fiction writer, attempting to imagine the lower deep of depravity to which future civilization might fall was merely a year or two ahead of his time, not decades or generations.
William Briggs has an article titled Academics—Who Else?—Call For The Killing Of Babies. It is a criticism, nay, an autopsy of a peer reviewed paper issued by bioethicists in Australia defending the infanticide of weak, crippled, inconvenient or otherwise useless and unwanted babies.
If you recall, the field of ‘bioethics’ is the field, made necessary after the Nazi experiments in World War Two, to invent new and shiny excuses for medical crimes against humanity aside from those the National Socialists used. The favored excuse is utilitarianism, combined with a breathtaking pretense of ignorance of the basics of biology.
Apparently, in Cloudcuckooland, homo sapiens give birth to a transitional form of life which is non-human, but which becomes human either at the age of seven years, or when when the skull clears the birth canal, or when the mother or a judicial body bestows whatever Linnaean taxonomic classification on the organism whim sees fit: I do not see why a mother, if it is she who decided if her baby is homo sapiens, cannot with equal godlike authority declare him to be a spaniel or a goldfish instead. This makes us the only known species who does not reproduce itself directly, but instead engages another species, creatures called fetuses, to produce us.
Ah! But we who know grammar-school biology, we are the mystics and nutbags cruelly attempting to tyrannize the mother, and rob her of her rightful magic powers to decree that humans are livestock, babies are parasites, A is not A.
Briggs lists the claims and with a manful reticence to use the type of withering sarcasm and flaming rage such nakedly evil claims should provoke, he list the logical fallacies involved in the claim.
It is to be noted that this gem appears in his comments box:
With respect, your focus on a single event to act as a threshold of a right to life is, at best, sidetracking. They already clearly acknowledge the lack of a solution to the threshold problem. The moment of conception is also imperfect as it is not clear to the non-religious why this cell should have an absolute right to life and arguably the religious texts do not give clear guidance either. “My threshold is best” is not an infallible line of attack, especially if you already accept is as a prior due to your religious convictions.
Obviously there are non-religious reasons for defining human life as human, if one wishes to rely on erring human reason rather than on inerrant divine commandment. But it is interesting to note that Mr Briggs does not mention or even allude to religion anywhere in his critique: he merely points out lapses of logic.
Interesting, because this commenter, rallying to the flag of the infanticides, immediately points his barrage against the Church, as if she were the main, or the only, enemy or obstacle to the Culture of Death.
This gives away the whole game, the motives, the final causes.
The pro-death camp, or, excuse me, the pro-choosing-death-for-babies camp are attempting to defend, promote, and (with ideas such as this) expand the right of the strong to betray and kill the weak for their own comfort and convenience. In each case they use necessity, what Milton called ‘the tyrant’s plea’ to excuse the crime, specifically that it is necessary for the innocent baby to die so that society will not have to go to the expense and effort of raising and caring for him, and effort which is (in a summary fashion) labeled ‘unbearable’ in this article.
Now it is possible that some intellectuals are merely sociopaths, and unable to make the simplest moral judgments about whether there is or is not something wrong with killing babies, Negroes, Jews and rape victims to achieve momentary pleasure or temporary convenience.
It is possible that they worship Moloch, and to see babies sacrificed to the dim and bloody gods of remote pre-history gives them a drunken thrill in their jaded lives, a sense of power, and soothes their terror of the devils and trolls they think rule the chaos they opine the cosmos to be. Since they are moderns, one might assume they are as unaware of their own motives as they are of simple moral principles.
The other possibility is that some or all of them are haunted by the tiny ghosts, crying for mommy, of babies never born, which number in the millions, and can be heard weeping along the moors on moonless midnights; and therefore the intellectuals seek to silence the voice of conscience which forms the only ears by which mortal hear the voices of ghosts. In their minds, the conscience means the Church, and so they point their weapons against her.
In other words, the opposition here, or one of them, has admitted both that the Church is the bulwark and guardian of the conscience in this fallen world, and that he knows the acts he and his promote are evil.
Read the Briggs’ article here, http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5304 and savor the adroit and sardonic yet elementary logic against which the intellectuals, allegedly our moral and mental superiors, flounder fecklessly.
I regret seeing such an article, so shamelessly promoting the worship of Moloch. It is like hearing a fire alarm, but not hearing the sirens of the approaching fire truck. Our mansion, the heritage of the West, as already ablaze, and the arsonists cannot be reasoned with.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
