Baby Amilla and the Brave New World of Peter Singer
By Miguel Guanipa (06/09/07)
On February 2007, after only twenty-one weeks and six days in utero, baby Amilla was born.
Unlike most overly premature babies that usually don’t fare as well, baby Amilla was sent home to her parents after spending four additional months in a Miami hospital’s neonatal intensive-care unit. This extraordinary effort to help her survive prompted Peter Singer , a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, to raise the question of whether or not families and society should go through the trouble of sparing the life of babies that require such extensive treatment, and typically grow up to become adults with mild to severe handicaps.
It is somewhat of a hair-raising experience to read Peter Singer’s recommendations for those who are arguably the most vulnerable members of our society. Singer does concede that when we argue that treatment for these children is futile we “make the ethical judgment that life with such a high level of disability is either not worth living or not worth the effort required by the parents and the community to make it possible for the child to live.”
One of his argument’s underlying assumptions is that the child has not yet begun to “live” as it pertains to quality of life questions. So in Singer’s view, the most responsible course of action for the parents is to terminate the life of any offspring who has been planted - by the indifferent hand of fate - on the threshold of such a burdensome and meaningless existence.
What Mr. Singer is hinting at is that there is a point at which the size of the baby is so negligible, it warrants the ontological designation of “non-person”; hence his moral ambivalence at endorsing the use of modern technology to save “smaller and smaller babies”. But the alternatives he proposes are not as benign, as Mr. Singer has been known to openly advocate for a 28 day grace period for parents of severely disabled newborns to decide if it is in their best interests to euthanize them.
Singer also appeals to an unwritten social pact that presumably exists between the parents of the child with severe disabilities who may opt for treatment, and the community which may be potentially invested in shouldering some of the economic or social burdens of caring for that child.
He suggests that by giving parents the option to eliminate the one member who is destined to experience untold hardship and suffering, they can spare others from the social discomfort and future expenditures associated with welcoming that child into the community, not to mention, free themselves from the burden of caring for someone with a severe disability; it’s a win-win situation.
When you read Peter Singer you can’t help but wonder if he realizes that he is speaking about human beings. He writes with such lucidity, one is almost persuaded that his motives are purely altruistic and driven only by true compassion for the parents of children for whom he proposes such Spartan measures.
Not surprisingly, Singer advances his philosophy with relative impunity, as he poses a penitential challenge to a society that has nearly lost all its moral authority, by rightfully pointing out the ''illogic'' of silently acquiescing to abortions while expressing moral outrage at the practice of infanticide. In pointing out this ideological inconsistency Singer seeks not to advocate for the sanctity of every life, but to introduce more justifications for terminating the lives of those who - in his and his fellow bio-ethicists’ estimation - are not worth living.
When he accurately points that there is no fundamental difference between the two, he may at first appear to be summoning the proverbial slippery slope, when in fact his goals are diametrically opposed to those of the pro-life camp.
His well articulated, measured attack is also directed at those who in his view mislead others by imputing religiously charged terms of no practical significance - such as “sanctity” - to the concept of life. To Singer these are nothing more than outmoded value determinations from “a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists [who will always] defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.”
A major roadblock to his vision is trying to challenge the “prevailing rhetoric that every possible effort must be made to save every human life”, as if this represented an outdated way of looking at humanity that needs to be replaced by the more utilitarian worldview he proposes, which is far more convenient for the rest of us the living.
As a bio-ethicist Singer can’t escape the fact that there is a right and a wrong ethical course here, or he would not be wrestling with the question of whether or not parents and physicians are morally bound to do the right thing in the first place. Where he stumbles is precisely at the point where he fancies that his active apostasy against what is traditionally viewed as the wrong choice (taking a life) anoints him to sanction it as morally permissible.
Those who stand for life painfully recognize that the milieu into which Jack Kevorkian has been released after 8 years of prison is a somewhat colder and more sinister one than it was back in his heyday when he helped legitimize the murders of 130 people under the banner of “physician assisted suicide”.
The torch has now been passed to respected professors like Peter Singer - once called by New York Times the “greatest living philosopher”- who get to mold the fresh young minds of our future physicians at prestigious universities and write essays about their fields of inquiry for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=singer_27_4
http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/0799/b799ps.htm
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1179
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070601/NEWS06/70601012/1008/news&theme=KEVORKIAN052007
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200509--.htm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9401EFDC113BF935A25751C0A9659C8B63
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