repoman
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That or renouncing parental rights and responsibilities if it is not allowed?
I vote yes...
I vote yes...
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Should infanticide for Zika babies be legal?
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whichphilosophy
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The parent has a responsibility to exercise good sense and precaution, though in poor countries where it is more prevalent this is difficult? The Zika virus can potentially harm unborn babies. Parents in such areas should be more responsible to avoid such areas or wear long sleeved shirts and trousers. They can use Insect repellants, or eucalyptus or even oil of lemon which repels insects. They should also use a condom to avoid this being sexually transmitted.
Parents can renounce rights and responsibilities but really this is not the answer to prevention. Further we may find ways to prevent deformities of children or remedy them after birth in future.
fast
Contributor
Does the thread title mean what I think it means? Are you saying that it should be permissible to kill babies after they are born if they are born with the Zika virus? Further, are you saying they should be allowed to renounce or forced to renounce parental rights if such killings are not permitted?
As to killing newborn babies, you vote yes. I vote no. We should not grant the state or other governing bodies the legal right to allow post birth killings. That's wrong. What I'm saying is that it's wrong to kill babies. Can there somehow, someway be a justified exception? That just might be a good question for the right crowd, but it's not a question I'd be eager to expose to just anyway to entertain.
People need to be on the right side of what's right so we know their hearts are in the right place. People too willing to kill babies because the ugliness of the virus quickly turns their thoughts of what's right upside down are not ready to entertain the moral consequences.
Well, why stop there? What if a baby is born with autism or an anxiety disorder or teh ghey? Sure, you might not know all of these things until later on, so I propose that parents can perform legal infanticide (with a doctor's note, of course - we're not barbarians) up until the child's eighteenth birthday.
repoman
Contributor
Why are you using a slippery slope argument? Those are pitiful.
They also help demonstrate the absurdity of stupid arguments by shining a spotlight on how stupid they are.
But to draw it back into your main argument, is your focus solely on babies with birth defects caused by Zika or other ones as well? If a child is born with other defects, should the same rules apply? Like if it's mentally handicapped or would need expensive heart surgery?
whichphilosophy
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If we start culling everyone with an incurable malady, our medical research technology may also be killed off in the process.
Well, what if we send these fourth trimester fetuses to research labs for experimentation instead of simply aborting them?
Elixir
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Can we send all those 100th trimester fetuses that are at Trump rallies too?
As President Obama says, "Don't abort, vote".
PyramidHead
Contributor
I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't see anything morally wrong about infanticide performed before the baby has gained some form of self-awareness that separates it from other animals I have no problem with killing painlessly (laboratory mice, livestock, zoo animals). Just draw the line conservatively, way before there's any possibility that the infant has a conception of itself or a cognitive preference to go on living. If a baby born with Zika is euthanized at two weeks of age, and the parents decide to wait until the epidemic has been resolved before having another child, nobody with an interest in their future well-being is worse off. So, I take Tom Sawyer's bait while disagreeing with fast on the blanket pronouncement that killing babies must be wrong. Peter Singer has gone into this topic at length, and gets a lot of hate for it, but I think he's right that nothing magical happens to a baby when it goes from one side of the birth canal to the other.
Elixir
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Singer has been brutally logical, and has been brutally attacked for it. I find almost all of the objections to his treatise to be emotional rather than reasonable, but there are exceptions; "draw the line conservatively" is a pretty vague directive.
PyramidHead
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Right. But it's a conversation at that point, not an uncompromising refusal to consider the proposal whatsoever.
Playball40
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What? Babies born with Zika or Microencephallitis? Big difference.
I imagine it's the microencephallitis. The gist of the post seems to be dealing with kids who are born with a severe birth defect.
Playball40
Veteran Member
The problem is it doesn't always present at birth.
That's why we're advocating 100th term abortions for mental defects which adversely impact quality of life like microencephallitis and Trump support. Parents can't always tell if a newborn baby is going to be weirdly angst-ridden and angry over dumb email bullshit and the like, but if these issues present themselves in a fifteen year old then parents have a difficult choice to make as to whether to terminate the fetus and they deserve society's support, not its condemnation.
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Again, maybe this means I am a monster for it, but I don't see the issue as being one of pain or suffering or snuffing out a self-aware critter. None of those things are particularly important. It's more snuffing out something that society has expended a lot of effort to produce, along with the perspective inherent in having a particular and chaotically modified upbringing, and the psychological damage such a killing causes to all involved.
Simply, it takes a village to raise a child, and while parents are arbiters in our society delegated to the authority of raising that child, we all invest in it, whether we see it or not. And we don't just allow people to be made to continue the species, although that is still a current concern. Instead, kids are valuable because they provide fresh perspectives on the human condition, and novel minds which haven't been solidified into fixed patterns of thinking. We spend lots of time and effort as a society on children, up to a third of their waking lives from age 5 to 18. We provide them leeway to make mistakes at our expense, and spend directly on them to immunize and teach and monitor their development.
As a result, children represent an investment, not just of the lives of the parents but of society. Society is LITERALLY invested in them. Further, children put a "whammy" on their parents. They are a drug dispenser as effective as a crack pipe. The effects of terminating a child after it has bonded does its part to derange and damage it's parents, no matter how flawed the child is. It isn't a pleasant thing to think about that our love for our children is motivated by an evolved urge to satisfy a need so base, but those who kill little humans without care are more likely to think less of ending larger lives, or carelessly raising children into dysfunctional adults that the rest of us have to deal with; if it was else wise we wouldnt have such a basic emotional reaction to infanticide committed by others. Killing babies is wrong not because of any romantic notion of babies suffering or being meaningful but because it wastes the effort to produce them and deranges the drug-addled minds of the parents.
So no, I don't think it is wrong to kill babies born with Zika per se, it is wrong to kill them because we have no way to reliably eliminate the negative consequences to all involved in disposing of them.
Simply, it takes a village to raise a child, and while parents are arbiters in our society delegated to the authority of raising that child, we all invest in it, whether we see it or not. And we don't just allow people to be made to continue the species, although that is still a current concern. Instead, kids are valuable because they provide fresh perspectives on the human condition, and novel minds which haven't been solidified into fixed patterns of thinking. We spend lots of time and effort as a society on children, up to a third of their waking lives from age 5 to 18. We provide them leeway to make mistakes at our expense, and spend directly on them to immunize and teach and monitor their development.
As a result, children represent an investment, not just of the lives of the parents but of society. Society is LITERALLY invested in them. Further, children put a "whammy" on their parents. They are a drug dispenser as effective as a crack pipe. The effects of terminating a child after it has bonded does its part to derange and damage it's parents, no matter how flawed the child is. It isn't a pleasant thing to think about that our love for our children is motivated by an evolved urge to satisfy a need so base, but those who kill little humans without care are more likely to think less of ending larger lives, or carelessly raising children into dysfunctional adults that the rest of us have to deal with; if it was else wise we wouldnt have such a basic emotional reaction to infanticide committed by others. Killing babies is wrong not because of any romantic notion of babies suffering or being meaningful but because it wastes the effort to produce them and deranges the drug-addled minds of the parents.
So no, I don't think it is wrong to kill babies born with Zika per se, it is wrong to kill them because we have no way to reliably eliminate the negative consequences to all involved in disposing of them.
Minority but not alone. I don't care about the age, I care about awareness. I consider personhood to extend from first consciousness to last consciousness. The body is always alive for some time before this window, it's sometimes alive for some time after this window. Outside this window I see it as the equivalent of killing an animal.
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I would allow infanticide of young babies regardless of zika. But that's just me. And doing that sort of thing would open a legal and ethical can of worms that probably wouldn't be worth the trouble. It's easier to just try to disseminate awareness of the risks and try to take preventative measures.