Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
Go ahead, read that again. I’ll wait.
That texts is no joke, not even a very tasteless one. It is an abstract of a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. This is a serious proposal.
Newborns are somehow inferior to other human beings, the fact that they’ll grow into ‘normal’ people is irrelevant, and adoption is not always ideal, so it’s okay to murder a baby if we don like it.
Lord Alton, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group in the UK, has rightly said that this development, and the thought processes behind it, “illustrates not a slippery slope, but the quagmire into which medical ethics and our wider society have been sucked”.

The slippery slope that we are one, since we live in a society (especially here in the Netherlands) which allows the killing of children before birth, leads to a quagmire in which it is okay to kill a child at any age, since it is okay to do so until a random number of weeks after conception.
What will these lead to? From accepting killing the unborn, will we go to the killing of newborn, to the killing of anyone who is undesired? What kind of sick situation are we in when it is even accepted to consider something like this? In the past, proponents of abortion hid behind the pretense that is was somehow for the best interest of the mother (and sometimes the child), but the authors of the paper linked above don’t even bother doing that. They essentially say that when a child is somehow undesired, or when raising him or her will somehow be difficult, due to whatever circumstances (not even necessarily related to the health of the child), it should be allowed to murder it in cold blood.
Just exercising my right to kill, your honour. No big deal.
Make sure you also read ‘After-birth abortion’ is logically sound: that’s why it will boost the pro-life movement.