Horror from down-under: Ethicists argue in favor of infanticide

With the Personhood bill being effectively defeated (It was technically only tabled until next year, but might as well be defeated in the near term for all practical purposes) I thought it might be appropriate to feature a paper written by a pair of ethicists out of Australia that was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. They tackled the sticky issue of killing newborns. (I had no idea this was even a debate. Silly me.)

The paper was written by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. Here's the abstract:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue 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.

I highly recommend reading the entire paper (It's only a few pages long and an easy read), which you can find here. It's very interesting, and by interesting I mean mind bendingly horrific.

The paper contends that newborns, while human and alive, are not persons, but "potential persons". Because only persons have a moral value, and because fetuses are not considered persons as evidenced by abortions being allowable in some situations, they show that newborns are not definitively different that fetuses. Therefore, they are not persons either. So, let the slaughter begin!

Alberto Giubilini, teaching kangaroos to shoot children at the range

What makes a person, you may ask?

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.

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. This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life...

They go on to say that while the mother may assign value to the infant, this is only a projected and "subjective" quantity that does not depend on the infant itself.

In essence because the infant is not capable of attaching any value to its life it cannot be harmed by being deprived of it. So, since an infant can experience pain it has a right not to have pain inflicted upon it, but since it cannot value life it has no right to it. They note that one does not have to be aware of the harm to be harmed; someone who has a lottery ticket stolen from them and never finds out it was the winner has been harmed despite their ignorance, because they are in the condition to appreciate what they would have had, had they been aware of it. Infants are too stupid to appreciate their life no matter how hard you try to explain it to them, so they don't have a right to it.

Stupid baby! Why won't you understand my abstract arguments about life!?

Naturally, this sort of thing should only be permitted in a situation where abortions would be acceptable. Like, if the baby has a horrible defect that isn't revealed till after birth. Or if society could be burdened by having to support another baby. Or if the newborn's parents might be slightly inconvenienced by having it around.

You see, the newborn's existence might harm real people's plans. The financial and emotional well-being of those affected by the baby's life could be worse off, so therefore the rights of real people trumps that of potential people. Because the future person the baby will become doesn't exist yet, and won't if we kill it now, that future person can't be harmed and therefore has a value of zero.

"Indeed, however weak the interests of actual people can be, they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people to become actual ones, because this latter interest amounts to zero."

Emphasis mine. I'll go ahead and draw the conclusion the authors didn't here: Since the potential person's moral value is 0, and any positive number is by definition greater than 0, that means that no matter how tiny the inconvenience or upset is to actual people, the baby's "alleged" right to life is trumped by it.

I was gonna have that baby...But that burger looks really good...

The authors naturally wouldn't want to call this practice infanticide. Infanticide has so many negative connotations!

"We propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk."

Also, the definition of infanticide is REALLY confusing. Just look at the Merriam Webster entry:

Definition of INFANTICIDE

1: the killing of an infant

So much grey area.

Francesca Minerva, putting the "bright side" back into "infanticide"!

The thing is, if you accept their premise of how personhood relates to the right to life, and their definition of a person, everything else falls into place. This paper shows why one should be completely pro-life. It references its justification of infanticide to the acceptability of abortions at least half a dozen times.

As the National Catholic Register states, "The second we allow ourselves to become the arbiters of who is human and who isn’t, this is the calamitous yet inevitable end. Once you say all human life is not sacred, the rest is just drawing random lines in the sand."