Legalizing Infanticide

Two things got me thinking about infanticide this morning:

First, this post from Freshman44, who says, "There is no point at which a fetus is an independent human being. None. You have to get born first. "Fetus" = "independent" does not compute."

Secondly, an article at scotsman.com about infanticide: "Professor Alan Craft, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, said that mothers who killed their infants were disturbed and needed help rather than imprisonment.

He called for such women, particularly those alleged to have suffocated their babies, to be dealt with in the civil, not the criminal, courts.

Prof Craft said: "Accusing mothers of murdering their babies in the first year of life is not the right way to deal with it. "

Wow. I've been wondering when we were going to start seeing more arguments like this.

Prof. Craft couches his arguments in terms like, "They are generally mothers who need help, and locking them up for life is not the best way to help them."

But what he really seems to be advocating is that killing a child under the age of 1 is not as serious a crime as other murder cases--not really a crime at all. He's not advocating that no murderer be prosecuted as a criminal, or even that no mother under the influence of postpartum depression be criminalized; only mothers who murder children under the age of one.

Really, it's not much of a step from seeing issues like abortion or the euthanization of severely disabled people as morally neutral, to this type of thinking.

Babies under a year old are completely dependent on others for their very life. Young babies who are completely breastfed are still receiving all their nourishment from their mother's body, much as they did when the mother was pregnant. They can't communicate on a level we can clearly understand, and most of their actions are governed by reflex or instinct. Therefore they aren't really rational beings and they aren't capable of opinions or cognitive thought in the same way as adults. They are completely dependent on others for their survival and for the most basic care. They can't meet any of their own needs.

These are the same criteria used by many to judge whether someone is really a "person" or not.

In earlier times, and still today in some cultures, the abandonment, sale and/or killing of unwanted children was a common and accepted practice. People could leave a child in the wilderness for wild beasts to devour, sell it as a slave, drown it or use it as a human sacrifice to their gods without penalty or social stigma.

An article by Dr. Alvin Schmidt, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Illinois College, The Sanctification of Human Life, summarizes much of the early historical evidence of this, and says:

"Historical research shows that infanticide was common not only in the Greco-Roman culture but in many other cultures of the world as well. Susan Scrimshaw notes that it was common in India, China, Japan, and the Brazilian jungles as well as among the Eskimos.5 Writing in the 1890s, James Dennis shows in his Social Evils of the Non-Christian World that infanticide was also practiced in many parts of pagan Africa. He further states that infanticide was also 'well known among the Indians of North and South America,' 6 that is, before the European settlers, who reflected Christian values, outlawed it. . . .

If unwanted infants in the Greco-Roman world were not directly killed, they were frequently abandoned--tossed away, so to speak. . . . In neither Greek nor Roman literature can one find any feelings of guilt related to abandoning children."

Dr. Schmidt argues that it was not until the influence of Christianity that these trends started to change. He gives examples of many early Christian writers who wrote and spoke about the value of human life and the wrong of killing/abandoning children, and took real action to help the situation such as establishing orphanages and adopting abandoned children themselves.

An article in The Columbia Encyclopedia notes that Christianity, Islam and Judaism all "[condemn] infanticide as murder."

Professor John Boswell in his book, The Kindness of Strangers : The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, covers the issue of child abandonment through history in depth. Here's a site with fairly extensive excerpts and summaries from the book.

As the national and world environmentent changes to be more influenced by neo-Darwinism, humanism and utilitarianism, we are seeing steady progress toward the legalization of infanticide.

It makes sense in a worldview where human life has no inherent value.

In the wake of several Dutch doctors openly admitting to killing infants, the response has been to push the creation of laws to legalize the killing of disabled infants. A number of prominent doctors and ethicists, including Dr. Ronald Cranford, promote the use of brain-damaged or disabled infants as organ donors along with promoting euthanization.

This article on The Abortion/Infanticide Link: The Dehumanization of Infants notes, "Michael Tooley, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado . . . has argued that there should be "some period of time, such as a week after birth, as the interval during which infanticide will be permitted." (Philosophy & Public Affairs 2 (Fall 1972) pp. 37-65 (c) 1972 Princeton University Press) Other "philosophers" have argued that parents should be able to kill their children "up to the time the (baby) learns how to use certain expressions.""

[Note: the bold emphasis in all these quotes is mine.]

Dr. Peter Singer, a strong utilitarian who promotes the idea that humans are no different than animals and advocates that parents should be able to kill their children up to 30 days after birth, has received several prominent ethics awards.

Here's an excerpt from Singer's article Taking Life: Humans (Excerpted from Practical Ethics, 2nd edition, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 175-217) in which he states, "I do not deny that if one accepts abortion on the grounds provided in Chapter 6, the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong. As I shall try to show in this chapter, however, this is not something to be regarded with horror, and the use of the Nazi analogy is utterly misleading. On the contrary, once we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that - as we saw in Chapter 4 - collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific. . . .

In Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics - not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time."

The New York Times published an article by Stephen Pinker called "Why They Kill Their Newborns" in which Dr. Pinker argues that infanticide (which he calls neonaticide or filicide) isproductuct of "the biological design of our parental emotions" and that "in most cultures, neonaticide is a form of this triage."

He comments, "Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth . . . It seems obvious that we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life. Otherwise, we approach a slippery slope that ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on the value of individual lives. But the endless abortion debate shows how hard it is to locate the boundary. . . . Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. . . .

What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? . . . the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do. . . .

Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. . . . So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy."

Will we see a return to a moral environment where a parent can, without penalty, kill any child under a certain age? I hope not. But it certainly looks possible.