This would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.

Frances Kissling of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania is saying in her post at the On Faith blog that it’s maybe better to kill babies than actually have them born in Mississippi. I’m not kidding.

And she’s a scholar at the Center for Bioethics?!

Now I’m gonna’ quote a large bloc here so you don’t think I’m telling stories. She’s referencing Mississippi’s personhood referendum coming up next week.

For those who do believe in the sanctity of life and the dignity and rights of persons, the Mississippi initiative raises many questions, chief among them: How are those of us who are persons to treat fertilized eggs, as well as born persons?

Mississippi is perhaps the last state with any standing to extend personhood to fetuses. A fertilized egg in Mississippi, should it be born, has one of the worst prognoses for a dignified life in the United States. What will that fertilized egg, once it is born, discover about how Mississippi treats persons?

The state ranks last among all states in health and third for the highest rate of diabetes and high blood pressure . It has the lowest per capita personal income and an unemployment rate of 10.6 percent. It is the last in academic achievement. More than 1 out of 5 people live in poverty. The state is second in the nation in terms of the imprisonment ratio (749 prisoners per 100,000 people.) If you are black, your chances of dying at birth or shortly thereafter are pretty high: fourteen out of every 1000 black infants ( 6.8 for whites) born die in childbirth or the first year of their lives. Your mother is more likely to die delivering you than mothers in 44 other states. If fertilized eggs could be afraid, surely the thought of being born in Mississippi would be traumatizing.

For people of faith, these are real ethical questions about what it means for those of us who have moral agency in terms of how we treat others.

Seriously? That’s what passes for bioethics nowadays?

In her argument for aborting babies she actually used the infant mortality rate! Huh? What?!

To be honest, if my life had to be in the hands of either someone from Mississippi or Frances Kissling, I’ll take the Mississippian. Every. Single. Time.

But more importantly, this brings to the forefront a running meme in the pro-abort community. Poor babies should die. If you’re going to be born poor it’s better that some doctor who graduated last in his Tijuana medical school rips you apart limb from limb in your mother’s womb – you know, because the infant mortality rate is so high.

Madness. Pure freaking madness.