The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”....They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.
This is the fundamental problem with the objection to abortion that foetus's are not "people" but are merely "potential". The argument can be used far too broadly and can justify the killing of a newborn child. So my question to those who use the "potential" argument, is how do you distinguish between a newborn and a foetus, keeping in mind that Oxford professors can't seem to manage it.
