After-Birth Abortion: Is Infanticide Wrong?

[PyramidHead]

And that is a conversation I wouldn't mind having. I just don't think that this thread was started to discuss that subject. I don't see why I should play nice when the other side obviously isn't, we've all seen where that gets us. Start your thread in the morality, or better yet, the natural science forum, and I'd be happy to discuss it on those terms.

That's fine, but I think you're also off the mark about Jolly Penguin's motives. He is genuinely interested in the topic and has taken the time to explore it, and wants to see what other people think about it. It just so happened that his exposure to the idea happened in the midst of an argument about politics. It's sad how that can tar people's perception of one's sincerity. I think morality is a better fit than natural science.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Even so, I find it funny that I used the same reasoning in the other thread to defend aborting a fetus--lack of preferences, lack of a sense of self, lack of a concept of time, equivalence to adult mammals from other species--and received several reputation points for it. But when the baby is outside of the womb, none of those arguments seem to hold water anymore, and the pro-choicers join the pro-lifers in making comparisons to Nazi Germany. It's easy to see what change has taken place, but it hasn't taken place in the baby: it's because everybody just went from thinking of a swollen belly with a slimy fetus in it to something with a face and blinking eyes, and the amygdala took over the steering wheel from the frontal lobe.

Most pro-choicers are also against abortion after so many months in the womb, such as 6, 7, 8 and 9 months. Most pro-choicers also discuss women's rights to their bodies and privacy of such mothers who need not be the caretakers of the infants or house them once they're born. Many (I don't know if it's most) also talk about how abortions ought not be a frequent thing (the "legal, safe, and rare" argument). I will add that the first two points I have outlined were significant factors in Roe v Wade: the potentiality of independence of the fetus vs a woman's right to privacy. So, I don't think one can claim that pro-choicers have such limited considerations as you've outlined.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Yes, I just said that I think it was wrong because, in my opinion, societies which value human life are better to me than those which don't. That doesn't make it somehow less subjective, though, and have that value be based on an external objective criteria as opposed to it having value because we decided we want it to have value.

Tom, values can be subjective without being arbitrary. I can't accurately describe how much I hate the word "subjective". More often than not, it's used as a rubber stamp to denote a topic as unfit for discussion. The fact is that moral viewpoints have consequences that can be evaluated against a background of shared goals. And those goals themselves can be evaluated, must be evaluated, to check if they are guiding us toward consequences that are unpleasant in ways we haven't considered. No society or individual just decides to value something. I don't care that my opinions are opinions. I think my opinions are correct in the context of a moral background that is probably shared by most people. That's the value of moral discussions: not to put the spotlight on something and conjure up a label of 'right' or 'wrong' arbitrarily from thin air, but to show how based on what most people already think is right or wrong, we can deduce a conclusion that not many people have dared to consider.

There are several ways to deal with this information. You can claim that my conception of what people really believe is flawed, and thus my conclusion doesn't apply. You can bite the bullet and say I'm right about what people believe and what it implies, but that it simply means we need to change what we believe. Or, you could simply accept the conclusion as an inevitable consequence of believing what people believe, and incorporate it into your moral compass.

A bad way of dealing with the information is to retreat to the usual mantra that something is wrong because people in your neck of the spatio-temporal woods say so, as if we should all count ourselves lucky enough to be born in the era where we finally figured out morality, and all new questions can therefore be shot down by appealing to the way things currently are.

Yes, subjective and arbitrary are not synonyms. However, opinions shared by lots of people are still just opinions. We choose what we want to value because of subjective internal reasons, not objective external ones. Regardless of how you feel about the word, the values that we give to things are solely based on what we decide is important. No matter what criteria you use, such as "It makes people happier", "It makes people safer", "It makes people healthier" or whatever, those are all valued criteria because we decided that they are valuable, not because the concepts have inherent value on their own.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Once you establish that newborns are not conscious or self aware (assuming that is true) it becomes difficult for many people to justify and explain to themselves why they care so much to protect the newborn from harm, and why they insist that killing the newborn is murder and that we should jail (or execute) such killers, taking away their freedom (or lives).

This is especially uncomfortable for pro-choicers, as it forces them to see in themselves the same thing that maybe just maybe drives pro-lifers to seek to protect the unborn from abortion. It challenges the narrative of pro-lifers as misogynists who only want to control women's bodies. So it was actually perfectly on topic in the abortion thread and very much appropriate to a political forum.

Suddenly we see the same arguments here from pro-choicers that we normally see from pro-lifers: arguments about it being human life, arguments about destiny and the life the being could potentially have and the good it could potentially do, and the empathic and emotional damage it does us to see or think of a defenceless human being killed.

In starting this thread I was hoping we would get a little more insight than that though. I was hoping to maybe discover some good reasons why we do care and should care (maybe about both). Or to reveal a human failing if that is what this is, so strong that it leads some to want to control women's bodies or take away people's freedom or lives. Defend that baby! Why? Most of us even instinctively feel a need to protect a baby even stronger than we feel a need to defend a grown man.

Perhaps we should also consider the killing of people in a vegetative state. Should it be OK to kill people in a deep coma? Should that be considered murder? Does it matter if the person has the potential to come out of the coma and be a conscious self aware and thinking human being again? Again, how is this so different from the newborn or the fetus?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

You give it the title 'after birth abortion' and then pretend it isn't about abortion. Have you no shame at all? I guess this is the sort of argument we need to get used to in the Trump era. People being blatantly, unashamedly dishonest and acting all offended when you point it out.

If you actually read the links in the OP you will need that "after birth abortion" isn't my euphemism. It is what the people (pro-choice people) are calling early infanticide.

And if you are more interested in scoring points for your team rather than exploring the moral, ethical, and philosophical underpinnings of what is really going on and discovering if and why we should care about the unborn, newborn, vegetative, etc, then that is truly unfortunate.

 

[Sarpedon]

It's actually quite simple. Once the newborn is detached from the mother, the objections we stated clearly in the other thread no longer apply. (i.e. it was a parasitic organism that was a potential danger to the carrier) Sure, the newborn still needs special care, but really the circumstance is entirely different. Once the newborn is freed from the mother, there are other options. The different circumstances make the two choices quite discrete.

It really isn't complicated at all. You only like to pretend it is because you like to imagine that we are all trying to talk our way into something we know is immoral.

And as far as your predictable wailing about comatose people, that should go as it should: the decision they themselves expressed, the decision of the medical professionals responsible, and of designated caretakers and guardians. Not self-appointed moral crusaders such as yourself. My mother designated me to make these decisions for her should it be necessary. She told me clearly what she wanted, and wrote it in her will. This is more than enough for me, should the time come, to carry out her desires in a way that I am completely comfortable doing. You have no part in that decision, and should have no part in any similar decision, save for those who may designate you as their caretaker. You give yourself away here by claiming to care about such people, when in fact you crusaders frequently trample over their own expressed wishes and the needs of their families.

It is you who complicate discrete instances of difficult decisions by trying to create a system that connects them. A system that is imaginary, and gives you the power to control others. In actual fact, there is no need for your system, or for you.

 

[Sarpedon]

I am not answering the specific points in the OP because I refuse to allow you to define the terms of the discussion. You found a fringe group that is in favor of infanticide. So I guess I'm wrong when I say 'no one' believes in infanticide. Just like I'm wrong when I say 'everyone' likes chocolate.

I refuse to argue against that point, because you are obviously trying to substitute a fringe group's beliefs for a larger group: these fucks for the pro-choice majority. I treat such with the same contempt I treat people who try to portray the views of Daesh for that of all muslims.

If you can't be honest, I will simply state the mainstream views and be done with it, rather than lowering myself to your level. I have been fair to you and your beliefs: I have acknowledged why religious people believe as they do, and treated that respectfully, even though I don't agree. What I don't respect is dishonesty.

 

[ronburgundy]

Has anyone bothered to establish that fetuses are in fact babies?

Some religious sects say that the soul enters the body at conception. Other sects disagree. As we are not religious here, I really think we ought to actually establish some facts before we make hysterical accusations and hyperbolic comparisons.

This seems to be one of those drunk revelations that turns out not to be too wise. Who has the right to kill any living breathing person?

So, then its fine to kill any person who isn't breathing on their own at that moment, despite being a living human in every other way?
If not, then the fact that a fetus isn't breathing on its own at the time you kill it but will be if you don't kill it, has no relevance to the morality of the act.
Note, I am fully in support of abortion rights which is purely a legal issue and not a moral one. I just don't engage in the dishonest delusion that the birth passage is some magical tunnel that instantly transforms an organism from having no moral status to full moral status, despite very little objective change to its nature, it's cognition, it's behavior, and its potential in all these areas.

Comparing a fetus to a born child is just ridiculous.

Far less so than comparing a child to an adult.
A 27 month old fetus is far far more similar to a newborn child than that newborn child is to a 5 year old.
To deny this scientific reality in order to rationalize a convenient but internally incoherent ethical system is ridiculous.

And any person who thinks women should be forced to endure pregnancy and birth and he long term consequences that come from birth are sick fucks. Maybe we should ask if it is moral to kill those sick wackos instead.

That has zero to do with the discussion. Your getting emotionally unhinged.
You feel the need to deny basic realities to make abortion a definitely non-moral issue no matter when or why it is done. Just because others don't feel to need to do so because they understand the difference between moral and legal questions, doesn't mean they have any interest in restricting abortion, only in pointing out the mindless, politically self-serving, unprincipled and internally incoherent morality of those who claim that killing a fetus at 27 weeks for any reason is perfectly moral while killing it 30 seconds later when it's outside the mother is as immoral as killing anything can be, no matter the justification.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Most pro-choicers are also against abortion after so many months in the womb, such as 6, 7, 8 and 9 months. Most pro-choicers also discuss women's rights to their bodies and privacy of such mothers who need not be the caretakers of the infants or house them once they're born. Many (I don't know if it's most) also talk about how abortions ought not be a frequent thing (the "legal, safe, and rare" argument). I will add that the first two points I have outlined were significant factors in Roe v Wade: the potentiality of independence of the fetus vs a woman's right to privacy. So, I don't think one can claim that pro-choicers have such limited considerations as you've outlined.

You're absolutely right about that. Most pro-choicers certainly do factor in much of the above, and I would go far as to say that many do care and wish to protect the fetus, just seeing the bodily autonomy of the mother to be as paramount.

But we also see a trend in downplaying the same on the other side. There are plenty of pro-lifers who weigh the same factors but differently (or people calling themselves pro-choicers who oppose abortion after a certain stage in development; so you may also call them pro-lifers - that issue isn't binary) yet we had that abortion thread full of pro-choicers denying that could be possible and insisting that pro-lifers must only care about controlling women's bodies.

Pyramidhead brought up newborns in that thread, and asked why we should care to protect even them, which is a very good and appropriate question. I tried to explore it there and was told it was a derail, so I started this thread. I also started this thread to get beyond the heated abortion debate, where it was becoming clear that tribal entrenchments were replacing reasoned analysis and exploration.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

In addition to my previous post, some other facts:
1. It is illegal in the US to be cruel to animals, even if not human;
2. infants might not have this abstract concept 100% we call "consciousness," but along the way from third trimester fetus to 5 month old infant they are gaining consciousness, including consciousness of pain (3rd trimester), conscious of poop in their diapers, conscious of being hungry, as well as conscious of mom and her voice in the 3rd trimester, and possible of mimicry when newly born.
3. The brain is not fully developed until the human is 25 years old.

Regarding #3, if you ask a teenager why they did something, you'll often get an "I don't know." That's not really self-aware, so it's okay to kill them?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Sarpedon, In the interest of exploring the topic, I will ignore your grandstanding and declarations of my character and motives.

comatose people, that should go as it should: the decision they themselves expressed, the decision of the medical professionals responsible, and of designated caretakers and guardians.

Not everybody has written a power of attorney for personal care. What should we do with them if they are comatose? Is it wrong to kill them? Why or why not?

Why would medical professionals be better equipped to answer this moral question? They can answer questions such as if the person is consciousthinking, can feel pain, is likely to recover, etc, but I see no reason why they'd have any better moral or ethical insight given those answers.

And of those who did state their wishes prior to entering the vegetative state, if they are not going to come out of it, should we do what is written for them? Do they as people still exist? We once had a lively (pardon the pun) debate on this in law school: why should we follow the instructions of a will; the instructions of a non-person who doesn't exist to now intend what the living person then intended?The only reason we could come up with was spiritual/religious; that the person somehow still exists to have rights and intentions. So as a materialist atheist, I don't see why a will should be honoured, and I am unsure about a living will.

 

[ronburgundy]

You didn't say why we should care to protect the newborn. Saying we need a dividing line and choosing it based on having an objectively verifiable moment, is not giving a reason why we should care to begin with. And once we do care to protect it, that want to protect it coming into conflict with another want (to grant women autonomy over their bodies) doesn't rationally erase the want to protect it, though it may outweigh it when we take both into consideration (depending on how we weigh the bodily autonomy against whatever it is that causes us to want to protect the newborn).

So again, I ask you. Do you care to protect the newborn from the mother killing it/him/her, and if so, why?

We are fucked as a species if we don't protect the young. May explain why protecting the young is a rather universal operative of mammals.

Except that rationale applies equally to fetuses, yet you deny that fetuses have any properties that are at all comparable to newborns.

The real rationale is that we want ourselves and those people we have chosen to care about (which is clearly only some of "our young") to not only survive but to live free without fear of constant assault and theat to live. So, we make rules about what people can and cannot do to each other. Like all rules, we decide who the rules do and do not apply to, and when there are expceptions, and these contingencies rarely are rooted in scientific distinctions but on pragmatic issues that make it easier to enforce the rules consistently and minimizes the rules negative impact on on other goals also related to that same goal of living free without assault, which requires that people have the self-determination over their own bodies.

There is no danger of so many people killing their newborns that the human race does not continue. So that is not a sound rationale to restrict killing of kids. Whether our species survives or not, we personally have less chance of surviving and civilized society no chance of surviving if we don't restrict the harm that someone can do to other people. This rule doesn't need to apply to every human to serve this goal, but rules are more accepted and followed when they are not arbitrary, otherwise people seek rationale's why they don't apply in their situation. The criteria for application should be clear cut objective with a rationale for the dividing line. Violating the principle of self-determination that gives life most of its value and makes us want to preserve ours is a pretty good rationale for not including fetuses in those who cannot be killed.

So again, I ask you. Do you care to protect the newborn from the mother killing it/him/her, and if so, why?

Basically, for the same reason that you want to protect yourself from someone killing you. It's hard to get people to abide by a rule against killing you, if its perfectly fine for you or others to kill your kids.

 

[PyramidHead]

In addition to my previous post, some other facts:
1. It is illegal in the US to be cruel to animals, even if not human

Indeed it is, but cruelty is limited to the infliction of undue physical or emotional distress. I don't know if it's illegal to painlessly kill an animal that isn't on the protected species list, but if it is, it's probably to limit the potential risk to humans who lack the proper training to subdue and euthanize an animal. Either way, not really germane to the issue, since nobody is advocating anything that would cause pain to a newborn.

2. infants might not have this abstract concept 100% we call "consciousness," but along the way from third trimester fetus to 5 month old infant they are gaining consciousness, including consciousness of pain (3rd trimester), conscious of poop in their diapers, conscious of being hungry, as well as conscious of mom and her voice in the 3rd trimester, and possible of mimicry when newly born.

These are all indicative of a healthy, functional mammalian nervous system. The question posed by the OP is whether having a working mammalian nervous system is enough to be granted full personhood, which in practice is obviously not the case since the vast majority of mammals are not afforded the same protection as humans. This can be for good reasons that relate to what is known about the preferences and proclivities of the mammals in question, or bad reasons that just draw a box around homo sapiens and declare anything outside it to be fair game unless we're feeling irrationally charitable.

3. The brain is not fully developed until the human is 25 years old.

Regarding #3, if you ask a teenager why they did something, you'll often get an "I don't know." That's not really self-aware, so it's okay to kill them?

Only if a 'fully developed' brain is a necessary condition for being considered a person it is wrong to kill. Nobody is suggesting this as far as I know.

 

[PyramidHead]

So again, I ask you. Do you care to protect the newborn from the mother killing it/him/her, and if so, why?

Basically, for the same reason that you want to protect yourself from someone killing you. It's hard to get people to abide by a rule against killing you, if its perfectly fine for you or others to kill your kids.

Earlier in this same post, you chided Jimmy for making an argument against infanticide that could equally apply to abortion of a fetus, but it seems here you are doing just that. I suspect that you, like me, agree that it's not a good argument to use for protecting a fetus. However, you seem to think that while allowing fetuses to be aborted will not make it difficult to enforce rules against murdering adults, allowing newborns to be killed will have that effect. Can you explain why?

 

[PyramidHead]

I have started a thread in Moral Principles if anybody would like to discuss the philosophical aspects of this question apart from the political aspects.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I have started a thread in Moral Principles if anybody would like to discuss the philosophical aspects of this question apart from the political aspects.

Maybe it is because I am a lawyer or maybe it is because I am not American (where things are uber partisan), but I don't see a need for the distinction. If you find something like infanticide to be morally wrong, why would you be politically for it? Is this a party partisanship thing? I'm not opposed to a mod moving this thread to that section, but having two threads seems rather pointless to me.

 

[Malintent]

I think that whether the child is inside or outside the mother's body matters for both legality and morality, but far moreso for legality.

The right not to be killed, like all rights, is a legal invention. A good one, but still a matter of legality that we cannot ascribe to all things in all situations, or we couldn't eat or defend ourselves. To ensure consistent application of such a legal principle, we must ascribe that right to all organisms that fall within a category that can be specified by clearcut objective facts, so that there can be no doubt when a person must not violate that right and no doubt when they have.
Thus, we have and should have a legal rule that the right to life (to not be killed by another) is ascribed to all organisms that meet the objective criteria of having been birthed by a human mother. We can and do specify other objective rules that grant some lesser level of rights to other organisms that don't meet this criteria, such as those that protect pre-brith fetuses and some animals from needless abuse and suffering. This rule will make infanticide a crime and abortion not a crime.

Using the moment of birth as the legal criteria makes perfect sense, both because it is an objectively verifiable moment, and because it keeps the right to life from becoming in conflict with the right to self-determine one's own body (without which the right to life has little value). Pre-birth restrictions on abortions inherently intrude upon a mother's right to self-determine their body.

But all that involves issues of pragmatism and our ability to apply the law consistently based on objective evidence and to avoid bias and abuse in the application of the law, which undermines its legitimacy and the social contract.
That doesn't really apply to whether a particular act should be judged as immoral. Plenty of acts that we should regard as immoral need to remain legal for those pragmatic reasons, and plenty of moral acts need to be treated as violations of the law.

Take a woman that decides at 27 weeks to kill the fetus that she deliberately conceived but now they just got a new job letting them travel the world and an infant would make that impossible. Compare that act to a woman who got raped but chose to have the baby, but then it suffered trauma during birth and was born with severe long long defects which basically means that it lacks 90% of the traits that phenotypically define a human being despite being genetically human, and is less "human" cognitively and behaviorally than the average dog. So, she kills the newborn.

I don't think that any remotely defensible ethical principles would deem the second woman as engaging in a moral wrong any greater than the first woman, while plenty of reasonable systems could deem the first as more immoral than the second, or at most equal in moral status.

I used extreme examples to illustrate the point that the mere pre vs. post birth difference cannot determine the morality in the way that is should determine the legality. But post birth killing can be less immoral with less extreme circumstances, such the second woman doesn't need to have been raped and could have even chosen to get pregnant, or the first woman could have a reason for her last minute abortion that is not so shallow but still far from anything neccessary to protect her from physical harm.

Note that unlike the rather dichotomous legal/illegal distinction, there is no such dichotomy in morality, but rather a wide continuum where actions stand in relative morality to each other. So, my answer to the OP is that because abortion can be a by-product of self-determination of one's body whereas infanticide cannot have that justification, infanticide will be less morally acceptable on the whole than abortion. Yet, there are plenty of possible exceptions where infanticide is no more immoral (and arguably less so) than some instances of abortion, but we should not expect the law to recognize those exceptions.

This ^^

 

[Tom Sawyer]

/mod

 

[PyramidHead]

Tom, values can be subjective without being arbitrary. I can't accurately describe how much I hate the word "subjective". More often than not, it's used as a rubber stamp to denote a topic as unfit for discussion. The fact is that moral viewpoints have consequences that can be evaluated against a background of shared goals. And those goals themselves can be evaluated, must be evaluated, to check if they are guiding us toward consequences that are unpleasant in ways we haven't considered. No society or individual just decides to value something. I don't care that my opinions are opinions. I think my opinions are correct in the context of a moral background that is probably shared by most people. That's the value of moral discussions: not to put the spotlight on something and conjure up a label of 'right' or 'wrong' arbitrarily from thin air, but to show how based on what most people already think is right or wrong, we can deduce a conclusion that not many people have dared to consider.

There are several ways to deal with this information. You can claim that my conception of what people really believe is flawed, and thus my conclusion doesn't apply. You can bite the bullet and say I'm right about what people believe and what it implies, but that it simply means we need to change what we believe. Or, you could simply accept the conclusion as an inevitable consequence of believing what people believe, and incorporate it into your moral compass.

A bad way of dealing with the information is to retreat to the usual mantra that something is wrong because people in your neck of the spatio-temporal woods say so, as if we should all count ourselves lucky enough to be born in the era where we finally figured out morality, and all new questions can therefore be shot down by appealing to the way things currently are.

Yes, subjective and arbitrary are not synonyms. However, opinions shared by lots of people are still just opinions. We choose what we want to value because of subjective internal reasons, not objective external ones. Regardless of how you feel about the word, the values that we give to things are solely based on what we decide is important. No matter what criteria you use, such as "It makes people happier", "It makes people safer", "It makes people healthier" or whatever, those are all valued criteria because we decided that they are valuable, not because the concepts have inherent value on their own.

But no concepts have inherent value on their own. NOTHING has inherent value on its own! That doesn't mean we stop talking about value. We just accept it and move on, and keep hashing stuff out. Say I think that reducing suffering is more important than promoting happiness, which I do. If you disagree about that, I think we have the potential for an interesting discussion, even if (perhaps especially if) it will come down to differences in some foundational view about how to conduct oneself in a world of competing moral agents. I know that it's not impossible to change one's perspective about that kind of thing, because I've changed mine, and it wasn't because of a strong breeze or a vase falling on my head, it was because I read what people had to say about it and decided it made more sense than what I used to believe.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Yes, subjective and arbitrary are not synonyms. However, opinions shared by lots of people are still just opinions. We choose what we want to value because of subjective internal reasons, not objective external ones. Regardless of how you feel about the word, the values that we give to things are solely based on what we decide is important. No matter what criteria you use, such as "It makes people happier", "It makes people safer", "It makes people healthier" or whatever, those are all valued criteria because we decided that they are valuable, not because the concepts have inherent value on their own.

But no concepts have inherent value on their own. NOTHING has inherent value on its own! That doesn't mean we stop talking about value. We just accept it and move on, and keep hashing stuff out. Say I think that reducing suffering is more important than promoting happiness, which I do. If you disagree about that, I think we have the potential for an interesting discussion, even if (perhaps especially if) it will come down to differences in some foundational view about how to conduct oneself in a world of competing moral agents. I know that it's not impossible to change one's perspective about that kind of thing, because I've changed mine, and it wasn't because of a strong breeze or a vase falling on my head, it was because I read what people had to say about it and decided it made more sense than what I used to believe.

Yes, I know that nothing has inherent value of its own. That's why the entire premise of my argument was about how nothing has an inherent value of its own, so I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with by rebutting my post by saying that nothing has inherent value of its own.