Infanticide is repellent. Feeling that way doesn't make you Glenn Beck

Academics should be free to claim that killing newborns could be as ethical as abortion – but we are equally free to be disgusted
Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva claim that 'killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be' Photograph: Erproductions Ltd/Getty Images/Blend Images

If you write an article proposing that newborn babies be killed, many people will find you morally disgusting. This should be obvious even to a professional philosopher. Yet Julian Savulescu, the editor of the British Medical Journal's Journal of Medical Ethics, who published such an article, appears outraged himself at the reaction it has provoked.

The latest issue of the journal carries an article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, two ethicists at Melbourne University in Australia, arguing that we should accept the killing of newborn infants for any of the reasons that we now accept as justifying abortion. There need be nothing wrong with the infant to justify its death. It is enough that its life should inconvenience the parents.

"We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be," write Giubilini and Minerva. "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. Accordingly, a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice 'after-birth abortion' rather than 'euthanasia' because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice, contrary to what happens in the case of euthanasia."

The argument by which they reach this position hinges on the idea that neither a foetus nor a newborn is a real person. An "actual person" in their terms is someone who can have plans and aims. As such, they are wronged by being killed if this deprives them of the chance to carry out their plans. But a newborn is incapable of planning, or having aims, just as a foetus is. Therefore, they say, it is only a "potential person" and, though pain can harm it, death can not.

In this line of reasoning, only the parents are harmed by the death of a newborn, because their plans and aims may be frustrated. But "potential persons" can't be harmed that way:

"If you ask one of us if we would have been harmed, had our parents decided to kill us when we were foetuses or newborns, our answer is 'no', because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the 'us' whom you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, then no harm occurred."

This reasoning impressed Savulescu greatly. In his defence of the paper on his blog, he wrote:



Some modern utilitarian philosophers have argued that there is no huge moral difference between a baby about to be born, at the top of the birth canal, and the same baby when it has emerged into the world. I first heard this from John Harris, at Manchester University. But the conclusion he drew was not that we ought to kill newborns.

The equation of abortion with infanticide is central to the rhetoric of many anti-abortionists. It is something that most pro-choicers emphatically reject. For them, the moral justification of abortion lies in the fact that an embryo is not a human being, whereas a newborn baby is. The moral status of a foetus changes over time in the womb, and while there will always be arguments about when the change should be recognised, there is wide agreement that a time limit on abortion is morally significant.

It certainly seems to follow from Giubilini and Minerva's reasoning that there is nothing wrong with sex-selective infanticide. There's no doubt that having a child of the wrong sex can be frightfully inconvenient for its parents. So if it's all right to abort a girl for her chromosomes, why not kill the newborns as well?

This question is not addressed in the article.

In any case, the piece was picked up by the website of the immensely popular rightwing American Mormon, Glenn Beck. The commentators there – who probably already believe that there is no difference between abortion and infanticide, or believe that they believe this – erupted in predictable fury.

Savulescu claims that he and the authors have received death threats. In his blogpost he wrote:


You have to wonder whether this is intended as self-parody.

If "the very values of a liberal society" include killing inconvenient babies, or discussing their killing as if this was something reasonable and morally competent human beings might choose to do, then liberalism really would be the monster that American conservatives pretend it is. Academics are and should be free to entertain monstrous ideas. But that does not trump the freedom of the rest of us to be repelled by their monstrosity.

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