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There’s No Good Argument for Infanticide

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Guest Post: Andrew McGee, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology

Reposted from The Conversation with Author permission

Philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva have received an avalanche of abusive comments and emails following the publication of their paper on “post-birth abortion” in last week’s Journal of Medical Ethics. The response has been despicable but it shouldn’t blind us to the flaws in the authors’ argument.

As the journal’s editor Julian Savulescu noted, their arguments “are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly … by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world.” But the discussion has continued because it’s been notoriously difficult to prove the arguments wrong.

Giubilini and Minerva’s argument is stunningly simple. There is no morally relevant difference between a foetus and a newborn baby, because their capacities are relevantly similar. Neither foetus nor newborn is really capable of forming any long-term aims. Only a person can form long-term aims that are capable of being quashed – and this is what differentiates us from other species – so neither a foetus nor a newborn are persons.

The kind of harm that consists of preventing a person from achieving their future aims is especially acute. And since neither a foetus nor a newborn are persons, they cannot be harmed in this way. Therefore, if we allow abortion on that basis, we should allow infanticide.

Many people who believe abortion should be permitted would reject the conclusion that killing a newborn baby should likewise be permitted. The challenge is to explain why the rejection of that conclusion is not irrational. That’s what I will attempt here.

The wrong of infanticide

First, we need to broaden the notion of aims so it includes immediate preferences and desires. As any mother will attest, a newborn baby has immediate preferences and desires that he or she wants satisfied, such as the need to suckle the mother’s breast. Why shouldn’t these shorter term desires count equally to the longer-term preferences of persons?

The problem with that response, the argument runs, is that it would apply equally to many other species that we don’t think twice about killing.

For consistency’s sake, it is said, we must adopt the narrower concept of person favoured by the authors, or we are guilty of speciesism (and speciesism is as bad as racism).

What makes humans different from most of the animal kingdom is precisely our capacity to form long-term aims that can be quashed. This makes us capable of suffering a kind of harm that other beings aren’t capable of suffering. That’s why it can be wrong to kill humans, but permissible to kill some animals.

But if we relax this criterion to include immediate preferences and desires of infants, then we have to give up killing animals and, on some views, even some insects. This drives the authors to assert that we do no wrong to a baby if we kill it.

Is there another way of approaching the problem? I think there is. We can deny the analogy between racism and “speciesism”. There is something primal about protecting our own flesh and blood, about the value we place on their wants and needs.

The authors might say: “so what? Why is that relevant? Emotional bonds have no place in moral discussion, for how we feel about a child doesn’t tell us how we ought to feel about it.” But the point is that there is a limit to the kinds of practices we can meaningfully subject to moral scrutiny.

Caring for our offspring is as much a natural fact about us as walking upright, so it makes no more sense to question whether we ought to do this than it does to question whether we ought to walk upright. True, there are occasions where the mother does not bond, but this is unusual. It does not mean that care for our offspring is not a fundamental feature of our humanity.

These natural facts can serve as the basis for the erection of moral norms, such as the norm that we ought not to kill our offspring. This is unlike racism, which is nowhere near as endemic or universal in human life as the instinct to care for our offspring.

But the authors might retort: infanticide has been more widespread in human history than it is today, and is still practised in some places. This might be true, but it is misleading.

In hunter gatherer societies, infanticide was practised out of material necessity of the kind we can only imagine today. If more young were born than could be suckled, or offspring with cerebral palsy were born, what could those societies meaningfully do? The options open to us today were not available in such societies. This should not be ignored.

We also should not ignore the level of ceremony and grief that accompanied the practices, which is an acknowledgement that if things could have been otherwise, the practice would not have been engaged in. So the practice of infanticide in the past doesn’t mean that the instinct to care for our offspring does not run deep in us – so deep as to be beyond question.

This instinct leads us to erect the rule that it is wrong to kill our children. It explains why we care for their wants and needs, while not valuing the wants and needs of other species in the same way.

We can therefore accept the narrow definition of person the philosophers prefer, but conclude that it isn’t the only determiner of value.

The role of emotion

Philosophers are prone to over-rationalising things. The emphasis on reasoning might blind them to its limitations, leading them to neglect the important role emotions play in our moral framework.

Consider the harrowing story of Dr Brian Hoolahan, a Nowra obstetrician who repeatedly witnessed babies taken for adoption from their unwed teenage mothers moments after birth, between the 1940s and 1970s:

“I remember the girls calling out ‘I just want to touch my baby, please let me see my baby’ and they were crying and howling and it was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Faced with this testimony, it is a bit easier to see why the value of a baby’s life cannot be intellectualised in the way that philosophers would have it, and why capacities are not the only thing of moral importance.

The pain, anguish and unimaginable enduring grief these mothers suffered all go to show the meaning of having a baby in human life, the central place it has in our emotional make-up. These instinctive responses to the birth of one’s child are the sources of its moral value. It is senseless to ask if these mothers really ought to be having that kind of response to their children.

Not every mother wants their child. But this doesn’t mean the child is of no value. The norm we have erected, based on the instinct shared by the majority of us, means we condemn such mothers if they seriously want to kill their babies.

Perhaps if the majority of us no longer wanted our children, we would abandon the norm. But that’s not how things are.

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8 Comment on this post

  1. <blockquote cite="The pain, anguish and unimaginable enduring grief these mothers suffered all go to show the meaning of having a baby in human life, the central place it has in our emotional make-up. These instinctive responses to the birth of one’s child are the sources of its moral value.">

    Do you really mean that another's emotional response to my existence is the source of my moral value?

    Perhaps that emotional response is an indicator of my moral value, but that indicator may not be present in every case.

    There are a lot of people in therapy who believe they have no worth precisely because of the consistently negative "emotional response" of their (flawed) parents throughout their upbringing.

  2. <blockquote cite="Many people who believe abortion should be permitted would reject the conclusion that killing a newborn baby should likewise be permitted. The challenge is to explain why the rejection of that conclusion is not irrational. That’s what I will attempt here.">

    You give several reasons why infanticide is wrong.

    I question you, aren't these reasons also applicable to an unborn child?
    Emotional bonds are without doubt present, as well as the instinct to care for the unborn child.

    Or is your argument coherent, because you do not attest unborn children with "immediate preferences" and "desires"?

    Can you please clarify this? I would be glad if I understood you correctly.

  3. <blockquote cite="caring for our offspring is as much a natural fact about us as walking upright, so it makes no more sense to question whether we ought to do this than it does to question whether we ought to walk upright">

    That something is a natural fact about us gives never a sufficcient reason for a moral norm. Nonsense examples like walking upright show clearly that it is not being a natural fact what makes something right or wrong. If someone chooses to walk on all fours, this might seem odd, as it is not 'natural', but it is certainly not morally wrong.
    On the other hand there are plenty of examples of properties that are <q cite="natural"> or <q cite="instictive">, maybe even <q cite="fundamental features of our humanity"> but nonetheless considered to be morally wrong. Racism might be an example, but also our disposition to kill, rape, cheat, …

    <blockquote cite="The norm we have erected, based on the instinct shared by the majority of us, means we condemn such mothers if they seriously want to kill their babies">

    We should never condemn anybody because of norms we have erected merely on the base of instincts, especially if he himself gives a rational line of reasoning for his actions.
    I do not want to advocate infanticide, but to ban it, better arguments are needed.

    1. Yes in life and death situations better arguments are needed. All of the above are founded simply on personal arbitrariness, and if one side thinks this is no reason to allow the other side this sort of special pleading whyshould they?

  4. Thank you for this great response to the article. In my estimation your arguments are pretty solid and certainly much better than the death threats and empty dismissals so many have projected. In my mind, your quote from the young mother says it all. Great job!

  5. A woman in my city microwaved a baby she didn't want. Is that ethical? The baby didn't really have a 'personhood' to lose. It's just sick what you people accept in mental masturbation.

  6. Claudio Ricciardi

    Nobody says that exists the discontinuity jump constituited by the complex phenomenon of human birth as been theorized by italian psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli (Death Instinct and knowledge, L'asino d'oro press, 2010). We become human beings by virtue of a new emergent quality that occurs during process of birth; a mutation of emerging new possibilities in quality related to the external environment particularly in the presence of light, which stimulates the functioning of the brain and activate the 'capacity to immagine' and the birth of human thought. There is no similar moral status of the fetus and neonate. The denial of these discontinuities and such resulting statements as 'the zygote is a person', the embryo and the fetus are equal to the newborn', abortion and infanticide are the same thing' represent a flat materialistic vision not acceptable in terms of philosophy and law; certainly they are not acceptable in terms of biomedical scientific point of view. Do not recognize this point of view brings and produces Nazism like in Germany during the second world war.

  7. Simply, Abortion is WRONG…..IT IS THE INNOCENT HOLOCAUST OF OUR COUNTRY AND THE WORLD. Facts have been proven over and over again that the baby is a person from the very beginning….how can anyone with any morals condone abortion? No matter how you look at it, one who performs the abortion is guilty of murder…..Yes, God will punish the world for the murders of the innocent ones every passing day. This Infanticide belief is even more outrageous. To spend time and energy on such deplorable beliefs is one of the reasons WHY our nation and the world are in the predicament that has come about…..Let us Protect Lives instead of destroying Lives….I thought medical professional to an oath to heal and save lives….Let us respect and cherish the Gift of Life instead of wanting to destroy it. "In God We Trust."

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