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  • 2015-07-29 (xsd:date)
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  • After Birth Abortion (en)
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  • On 29 July 2015, the unreliable web site Conservative Post published an article titled Liberals Debate to Introduce 'After-Birth Abortions' as Newborns 'Are Not Persons.' The similarly disreputable web site American News published a similarly titled article on the same day. The two articles featured nearly identical content, light on details and context but weighing heavy on the outrage scale: Both headlines suggested American liberals had embraced the idea of after birth abortion but supported that claim by referencing assertions made by two University of Melbourne (Australia) ethicists in a 2012 Journal of Medical Ethics paper titled After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live? Not only were the ethicists (Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva) neither American nor liberals (in the sense suggested by the title), but neither were politicians in their home countries nor politically advocating for the merits of infanticide. The paper on which these July 2015 articles were predicated was submitted back in 2011, and outcry at the time was global and almost universally in disagreement with the ideas most believed had been proposed in the original paper. On 2 March 2012, the paper's authors post a public letter to the Journal of Medical Ethics blog that addressed some of the widespread outrage resulting from their original piece: Minerva and Giubilini's submission (to a medical journal covering the broad subject of ethics) in 2011 was almost immediately misconstrued to be an argument for infanticide. Whatever their intent with respect to the article was, the submission was not recent in July 2015 (at which time it was nearly four years old). Moreover, the points made by the paper's authors met near-universal objection at the time they were published, and no mainstream political groups (including liberals) leaped to embrace them; we were unable to locate any vocal medical, social, or political entity (mainstream or fringe) actively campaigning for infanticide (or as the articles called it, after birth abortion) in mid-2015. While the subject drew the interest of many during a debate over abortion and medical ethics, the July 2015 articles mashed up old medical ethics debates with current ideological disputes to manufacture social media outrage over a non-existent issue. (The issue-no-one-was-debating template bore a striking resemblance to a earlier manufactured post birth abortion controversy promulgated in October 2014.) (en)
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