Note: Whilst preparing this I looked for the article in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The paper on after-birth abortion referred to was by Australians  Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. Mysteriously, their article has ‘disappeared’ from the on-line version of said Journal.

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
11 Mar 2012

There were 44 million abortions worldwide in 2008 according to last month’s issue of the Lancet.

It is a huge number; big enough to worry the editor, who declared that reducing abortion “is now an urgent priority for all countries”.

But not everyone agrees.  Also last month in another medical journal, two Australian academics opened abortion’s last frontier with a discussion of the “ethics” of “after-birth abortion”.

The argument is simple enough.  There are persons and “potential persons”, who are in fact “non-persons” and can be killed.