The moral foundations of our civilization are crumbling.

Law is the essence of civilization. Certain moral principles underlie all law. Chief among them is that murder is wrong.

Prohibition of murder, theft, fraud, and false witness is much older than the Bible, the Hammurabi Code, or any known codification of laws.

But now, as an intense hatred of humanity is spread by the intellectual elite of the Western world, some of whom even advocate the total elimination of the human species, murder is no longer a crime. It is what enlightened, responsible, university-educated people approve of and believe should become state policy.

Especially they advocate the murder of the most helpless and defenseless – babies and small children.

No doubt the same people who want to kill children because they cost too much to keep in energy, effort and money, will go on protesting against the judicial execution of murderers. They want to protect the guilty and do away with the innocent.

We, unfashionably, see the necessity to protect the innocent and do away with the guilty.

Of course we recognize the existence of moral dilemmas: the question of euthanasia will always remain a difficult one. Whether to kill out of compassion is a different moral question from whether to kill for one’s own convenience.

We hoped to hear an outcry of moral rage against the advocacy of legalizing child-murder by parental choice or state order. We are watching for columnists, pundits, opinion-formers to protest in the strongest possible terms.

We have found, heard, read only a few.

One who can be relied on for moral clarity is Bruce Bawer. He correctly labels the two “ethical scientists” who advocate the killing of children if they’re a nuisance to their parents or the state, Nazis.

[I learned about ] an article … by two individuals named Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. The former is connected with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan and with the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in Melbourne; the latter is associated with the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Both share the same job description. They are “medical ethicists”.

The point of their article is simple. They argue for the morality of what they call “after-birth abortion” – in other words, as they bluntly put it, “killing a newborn.” They say that such killing “should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” They explain that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion” to “euthanasia” “because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice, contrary to what happens in the case of euthanasia.”

Their case for the moral legitimacy of “after-birth abortion” is this: a newborn, they say, has not yet “formed any aim that she is prevented from accomplishing” if you snuff her out shortly after birth. Though newborns, like fetuses, are indeed “human beings and potential persons,” a newborn is not yet “a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life.’” Giubilini and Minerva explain that for them, the word “person” signifies “an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” Since newborns are not “persons” in this sense, their “alleged right…to develop their potentiality … is over-ridden by the interests of actual people (parents, family, society) to pursue their own well-being” – for “actual people’s well-being could be threatened by the new (even if healthy) child requiring energy, money and care which the family might happen to be in short supply of.”

So speak the “medical ethicists” – one of them connected with Oxford, no less. It is all quite chilling …  Giubilini and Minerva – if I keep repeating their names, it’s because I want to make sure you and I remember them – are purportedly talking here about what constitutes humanity, but their very language is the epitome of inhumanity. And it is all too much of a piece with the language of the Western elite generally, which does a good deal of talking about the poor and the helpless and the greater good, but which, more often than not, is less concerned with attending to difficult real-life responsibilities than with puffing up its own image while making its own existence as smooth, comfortable, and problem-free as possible.

Nazi science: to be straightforward about it, that’s pretty much what Giubilini and Minerva are selling. And a lot of people in our time seem eager to buy it.