http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/baby-its-a-crying-shame/story-e6frfhqf-1226398054333
Baby, it's a crying shame by: Andrew Bolt From: Herald Sun June 18, 2012 12:00AM
What are these? Three family planning officials in China have been suspended over the horrific abortion of a baby girl. Source: HWT Image Library
DENG Jiyuan has shamed the tyrants of Beijing. But don't cheer just yet - because he shames us here as well.
..Two weeks ago Deng, a 29-year-old farmer from China's backblocks posted on the internet a ghastly picture of his wife Feng Jianmei in hospital.
Feng had been seven months' pregnant with the couple's second child, but family planning officials told them they'd violated China's one-child policy.
They were told to pay a $6300 fine if they wanted to go ahead with the pregnancy, but didn't have the cash, so Feng was grabbed, beaten and given an injection that aborted her daughter.
Her sister photographed her with her bloodied and dead child lying next to her, and Deng posted the picture.
Within several days it became the most popular topic on Weibo, China's Twitter.
It's a sign of the power of the internet that even some rural farmer can now force change on one of the world's most authoritarian regimes.
Three local family planning officials have been suspended, and the Ankang city government in Shaanxi province has offered "deep apologies" for this "illegal action".
We can take a little heart from this crime.
China's dictatorship is fast changing from one that could once murder millions without a pang of conscience, to one whose citizens can shame it into change.
But shouldn't Deng's picture of his dead daughter also shame us into change?
Two things about that photograph make it so powerful.
One is the terrible story it tells of a child killed by officials to the despair of its helpless parents.
The other is that the photograph makes brutally clear that we are indeed talking about a child.
A girl. Someone's daughter. Not something non-human that we often dismiss as a "foetus".
So what it shows is an abortion of the kind that, without the use of force against the mother, occurs right here.
Take the 2000 abortion at Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital of baby Jessica, whose distressed mother threatened suicide if made to give birth to what she feared might be a dwarf. But probably wasn't.
That baby was 32 weeks in the womb. Older than the daughter of Feng Jianmei.
And that is the difference. No pictures.
Same with Jessica Jane, aborted in Darwin after her mother chose her career instead.
She was evicted from the womb - alive - and left crying in a stainless-steel dish in an empty room until she died, 80 minutes later.
Pictures might have made a difference.
Or maybe not. After all, Australia's highest honor - a Companion of the Order of Australia - was last week given to philosopher Peter Singer, who sees nothing inherently wrong in the killing of children such as Jessica Jane.
In fact, why not kill some babies after birth, too?
As Singer has written: "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.
"The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second.
Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him."
But why stop at killing merely the disabled?
Alberto Giubilini of Monash University and Dr Francesca Minerva of Melbourne University recently wrote in the ironically named Journal of Medical Ethics that "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".
After all, "if criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the foetus is healthy ... then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn".
So the killing of Feng Jianmei's daughter appals you?
Dry your eyes. We kill babies like that little girl, every week.
The difference? No photos.
