Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say "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." As such they argued it was "not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense." The authors therefore concluded 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." They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that "only the 64 per cent of Down's syndrome cases" in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing. Once such children were born there was "no choice for the parents but to keep the child," they wrote. To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care. However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others - their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised. They preferred to use the phrase "after-birth abortion" rather than "infanticide" to "emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus." Both Minerva and Giubilini know Prof Savulescu through Oxford. Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University. Giubilini, a former visiting student at Cambridge University, gave a talk in January at the Oxford Martin School - where Prof Savulescu is also a director - titled 'What is the problem with euthanasia?' He too has gone on to Melbourne, although to the city's Monash University. Prof Savulescu worked at both univerisities before moving to Oxford in 2002. Defending the decision to publish in a British Medical Journal blog, Prof Savulescu, said that arguments in favour of killing newborns were "largely not new." What Minerva and Giubilini did was apply these arguments "in consideration of maternal and family interests." While accepting that many people would disagree with their arguments, he wrote: "The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he added: "This "debate" has been an example of "witch ethics" - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in. He said the journal would consider publishing an article positing that, if there was no moral difference between abortion and killing newborns, then abortion too should be illegal. Dr Trevor Stammers, director of medical ethics at St Mary's University College, said: "If a mother does smother her child with a blanket, we say 'it's doesn't matter, she can get another one,' is that what we want to happen? What these young colleagues are spelling out is what we would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new. Referring to the term "after-birth abortion," Dr Stammers added: "This is just verbal manipulation that is not philosophy. I might refer to abortion henceforth as antenatal infanticide.