Worthwhile Reads: Abortion and Infanticide

I think the huge difference between before and after birth is that, once the baby’s born, somebody else can look after it. And in rich countries, there’s always someone who will, if only the state.

When there’s nobody else to look after the newborn – well, I need to think some more about that. Because in third world countries that must often be the case. Do you starve your existing children to feed the new one?

And I have a corner of my brain wondering just how far the Tea Party will go in reducing state help for the vulnerable. American parents couldn’t be faced with that choice – could they?

While birth is an arbitrary line as regards the child’s development, it is not an arbitrary line in the mother’s relationship to the child. In utero, the child is using the mother’s body, and she has the right to deny consent for the child to do that, since she obviously never explicitly consented to do so prior to the pregnancy. The woman has a fundamental right to the integrity of her body and a right to choose whether or not another person can use it.

After birth, however, this particular fact is no longer relevant, since the child is no longer availing itself of the mother’s body. The mother (and father) now have a choice about whether or not they are willing to assume responsibility for the child. After that, whoever assumes responsibility for the child must either provide for his or her needs or make arrangements such that someone else will. Because at this point they have voluntarily committed themselves to the child’s well-being, and this is a fundamentally different relationship than the one that existed before birth.

This is a difficult topic mainly because people expect some kind of clear dividing line on every action’s moral worth or lack thereof. Everything has to be black and white. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t cooperate with this delusion.

I see infanticide as a dark gray point on the moral spectrum. Typically not acceptable in the vast majority of cases due to the existence of alternatives. Regarding the worth of an already born child as zero is odd. That seems to be placing it below even the worth of an adult animal, at least. For Peter Singer of all people to argue for justifiable infanticide in most cases seems bizarre, considering his significant work on animal rights. Surely newborns are not that far inferior to most animals in their qualities.

Considering the points of the Slate article…

(1) Fetal development is arbitrary, yes. There is no basis for arguing to the contrary, since it requires denying biological fact. However, conflating this and the claim that moral development is arbitrary is weird. Moral development doesn’t need to be as arbitrary as reality, because the moral codes of people can be reasoned out. Biology won’t change just because we work our way through it, but socialized codes of behavior certainly do.

The other issue is that to the extent that you can call moral developments in a fetus arbitrary, you can pretty much call all moral developments exactly the same. This seems to descend into relativism and heavy subjective judgement very fast. If we’re so sure that moral development in people generally is not arbitrary, then we ought not to suddenly jump to the conclusion that this case is different just because it happens inside a woman’s body. Likewise, you really need a particular reason to pull out the subjectivity card other than biological facts. Or are we descending into the naturalistic fallacy now?

(2) The concept that only people can cause moral obligations might be widely accepted, but that doesn’t actually make it true. We can’t make arguments from popularity here. A fetus or child could both not be a complete person and still have some limited rights; there’s no sense in jumping to extremes. I personally liken the rights of a child as similar to that of fairly sophisticated adult animals. They don’t necessarily have exactly the same value as people, but killing them arbitrarily is wrong because they do have some value in any event. Furthermore, most children have the potential to grow in value and develop beyond the extent that a cow or a dog would. This doesn’t mean that much if we literally cannot find anyone anywhere to care for that child in order to ensure those developments, but that seems a faulty assumption in many cases.

(3) It’s resting on a far viewpoint to say that “any” burden on the mother would justify infanticide. However, I can conceive of extreme cases in which there may be real world parallels where infanticide would be morally ambiguous. They rest on the possibility that it may be simply impracticable to find anyone to raise the child, and therefore that the child will either die from malnutrition and neglect or barely survive and end up suffering miserably. Some burdens are too much to ask of the mother, and certainly her life would always be one of those. That doesn’t mean the typical burden rises to that level.

(4) It’s somewhat difficult to argue with this premise. There is definitely something to the concept that people determine their own value and meaning in life, and this appears to apply in various degrees to children as well. However, there’s a moderate flaw in that completely self-determined value of everything builds a disjointed and dysfunctional society. We need to have some agreement in order to have cooperation at all.

(5) Mostly I find this one agreeable. Any sufficiently serious defect should normally be considered grounds for termination of a pregnancy, and it’s hard to see how infants differ significantly. I would qualify the cases to life-threatening ones, or those of massive and permanent hardship or illness, though. That’s the sufficient level in my view. Ordinary survivable diseases and genetic defects do not rise to the necessary justification.

There’s an open question as to whether severe mental incapacity is in the same severity class as deadly diseases and so forth. For the most part, I think it probably does qualify. My reasoning is that in a hypothetical world where a “perfect cure” for extreme cognitive states exists, using the cure on someone appears to be functionally no different than killing the existing individual and replacing them with someone else. The “output” person and the “input” person are too different to be reasonably understood as genuinely the same, so morally we ought to see them as unique. However, this suggests either that (a) where it is impossible to obtain informed consent, using such a cure is immoral, or (b) our sense of value in identity is not anything like what we generally perceive it to be, and thus the cure is not really the equivalent of a killing. One way or the other it breaks some paradigm.

Personally, the only genuinely astounding part of these moral discussions we have is that so many people think they can simply assert the answer based on some kind of authority, intuition, or personal anecdote. That’s true nonsense, arbitrary in the strongest possible sense, and merely a very thinly veiled attempt at social control and grabbing power.

I would be curious to hear your views on the matter, Libby Anne.

I’m currently doing a postgrad degree in philosophy with a focus on ethics, so this is a very interesting topic for me, which I have considered at length. I recently read Peter Singer’s book “Rethinking life and death : the collapse of our traditional ethics” which was a very interesting read for anyone interested in the ethics of life and death and the definitions thereof.
The abortion debate clearly centres around the personhood of the fetus, and I have long been of the opinion that an integral part of what defines a person (not a human being) is a certain degree of rationality, especially practical (moral) rationality, therefore it could be said that I think a person is someone who is a moral agent. Many philosophers do not consider children (much less animals) to be moral agents, but I disagree a little on this point. I do not think that there is a clear line, where on one side one is a moral agent and on the other one isn’t. I think it’s a gradual slope. And I think (even young) children, and some of our closest non-human animal relatives may be on the lower end of that slope, as aspiring moral agents. I think that the beginnings of moral agency and the right to life do, to some degree, go hand in hand. Therefore, I agree that infanticide is in some cases permissible.
I say ‘some’ not because I think some infants have attained the beginnings of moral agency, rather because even though they do not (necessarily) have a full right to life, does not mean that they (like fetuses) have no moral value whatsoever. In the case of the fetus I think that the mother’s right to do refuse the fetus consent to use her body trumps any value the fetus has. In the case of an infant it becomes trickier, not because birth is some magical point of moral definition, rather because it no longer needs the mother’s consent to use her body, as it can survive without it. Therefore, I think that an infant that could be adopted immediately may not be killed. On the other hand, I’m not sure about infants that would simply be left to the care of the state, since contrary to a previous commenter, I do not think that care or foster homes ‘work well’. And infants with disabilites will often have trouble finding adoptive parents.