The truly strange thing about this is that Francesca Minerva, the author of the paper, is surprised by the death threats. After all, she says, “this is pure academic, theoretical discussion.” It obviously hasn’t occurred to her that the death threats were probably just academic and theoretical.

As the journal’s editor, Professor Julian Savulescu noted,  Minerva’s argument that a newborn baby is not an “actual person” and, therefore, can be used, abused, killed and discarded is “largely not new”. It was used before in the Final Solution.

From here:

A researcher at the University of Melbourne has been the target of numerous death threats after she published a theoretical paper which argued killing newborn babies is no different from abortion.

The paper, written by Francesca Minerva and Monash University teaching assistant Alberto Giubilini, was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics last week and is titled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”

It suggests newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life” because they “both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life of an individual”.

Dr Minerva, who said the last four days have been the worst in her life, has asked for people to understand the perspective of her work.

“This is not a political paper, this is not a proposal for a law,” she told ninemsn.

“This is pure academic, theoretical discussion.”

Dr Minerva said the paper was based on thirty years of medical ethics discussions.

“Both a foetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of a ‘subject of a moral right to life’,” the paper states.

“We take ‘person’ to mean 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.”

They conclude their argument by stating: “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.”

Dr Minerva said she was not expecting the overwhelmingly negative reaction and believes her argument has been taken out of its academic and theoretical context.