Treating the most vulnerable

Having just finished reading Betsy McCaughey’s op-ed piece in the Feb. 12 Herald (“Late-term abortions should pose moral dilemma”), I cannot help but think how low our morals have sunk and what a slippery slope we as a society are about to descend.

What I found to be most disturbing was the fact that so many abortion facilities terminate pregnancies that are 24 weeks along and that a United States senator blocked legislation to require medical staff to treat any baby that survives an abortion on the grounds that it would “interfere with decisions between a woman and her doctor,” with no thought given to the infant.

Even more disturbing was learning that Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the medical ethics department at the University of Pennsylvania, could so cavalierly state that there is no place for morality in medicine and that infants are of little value to society since they have not yet received “the investment of substantial education and parental care that adolescents have.” This from the mouth of a doctor who argued that scarce medical resources should not be expended on the elderly.

Additionally Peter Singer, a Princeton University bioethicist, insists that late-stage fetuses and newborns may look human but they lack the mental awareness to be considered persons. He states that killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person without any regard to the pain they must suffer in their annihilation.

These are so-called ethicists defining what is immoral. Where does this logic take us; are the infirmed, the mentally challenged and the elderly next on the list of expendables?

President Franklin Roosevelt said many years ago that the greatness of a society is determined by how they treat their most vulnerable members. Who are more vulnerable than infants?

— Vincent D. Basile, Stoneham