The murder of Baby Knauer is precisely the scenario Singer espouses when he argues that parents should be allowed to have their unwanted babies killed. Indeed, Baby Knauer’s father was quoted by Lifton in The Nazi Doctors, stating in 1973 that Brandt assured them “we wouldn’t have to suffer from this terrible misfortune because the Führer had granted us the mercy killing of our son. Later, we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich could be proud.”72 Note the exact juxtaposition of Brandt’s justification for murder with Singer’s philosophy.
It appears that the protesters in Germany and Austria who see a moral equivalence between Singer and the German euthanasia Holocaust don’t have it so wrong after all. While there is not an exact match at every level of substantive ideas—Singer does not support the involuntary killing of physically disabled people, and most babies were killed without their parents’ consent—the similarities between Singer’s beliefs and those of the German doctors who willingly slaughtered tens of thousands of disabled babies are too striking to be ignored.
In addition to being a utilitarian philosopher, Singer is also a very political animal. Having received much grief for infanticide promotion, a few years ago he (sort of) walked back his advocacy, stating at a bioethics conference held at Princeton: “Maybe the law has to have clear bright lines and has to take birth as the right time, although maybe it should make some exceptions in the cases of severe disability where parents think that it is better for the child and better for the family that the child does not live.”73 In other words, “maybe”—Singer always advocates odious acts with such equivocal language—we should be able to kill babies, but only if they would have very difficult lives, and then, only because we care.
Singer and Fletcher are far from the only bioethicists to seriously advocate permitting infanticide in some situations. An icon of bioethics in Britain, Jonathan Glover, wrote quite bluntly that infanticide is not morally wrong because babies are “replaceable.”74 Glover’s reasoning, like Singer’s, doesn’t require that the killed baby be disabled: “It is wrong to kill a baby who has a good change of having a worth-while life [a life worthy of life], but . . . it would not be wrong to kill him if the alternative to his existence was the existence of someone else with an equally good chance of a life at least as worth-while.”75
As to those who oppose infanticide because babies cannot “choose” to be killed—autonomy, after all, being an overarching value in bioethics—Glover casually dismissed the objection: “Killing someone overrides his autonomy where it goes against his own preference for staying alive. This objection to killing provides no argument against infanticide, for newborn babies have no conception of death and so cannot have any preference for life over death. . . . The objection to infanticide is at most no stronger than the objection to frustrating a baby’s current set of desires, say by leaving him to cry unattended for a longish period.”76
Since the first edition of this book, other bioethicists have jumped enthusiastically onto the infanticide bandwagon. In 2014, for example, the prominent Canadian bioethicist Udo Schuklenk—an enthusiastic adherence to the quality of life ethic—wrote, in essence, that infants judged to have a life unworthy of life should be euthanized: “A quality-of-life ethic requires us to focus on a neonate’s current and future quality of life as relevant decision making criteria. We would ask questions such as: Does this baby have the capacity for development to an extent that will allow him or her to have a life and not merely be alive? If we reach the conclusion that it would not, we would have reason to conclude that his life is not worth living.”77 What makes a life worth living? Well, that would be in the eye of the utilitarian beholder, wouldn’t it?
As Binding and Hoche did in Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, Schuklenk cited strained resources as a rationale for committing medical infanticide: “The question of whether it would be a wise allocation of scarce health care resources to undertake the proposed surgical procedures invariably arises in circumstances such as this. Continuing life-prolonging care for the infant would be futile, it would constitute a waste of scarce health care resources. Health care resources ought to be deployed where they can actually benefit patients by improving their quality of life.”78 And he expressed zero qualms about violating the sanctity and equal dignity of all human life:
A quality-of-life proponent could just as well argue that respect for human dignity demands that the infant’s life be terminated on compassionate grounds. Human dignity is mostly a rhetorical cloak for other—more controversial—ideologic convictions. Incidentally, this applies to other types of nonarguments, too. For instance, opponents of infanticide frequently ask whether we would want to live in a society that permitted such a course of action. Proponents could simply reply affirmatively. We would be better served to avoid this kind of rhetoric in public and professional discourse altogether.79
How does that old song go? “Everything old is new again.”
Usually, arguments in bioethics for infanticide escape public notice because they take place in professional journals or at symposia where academics read their papers to each other. For example, Schuklenk wrote in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, hardly a publication on most people’s “must read” list.
But once in a while, people get a glimpse of what utilitarian bioethicists have planned for them, leading often to angry controversy. That is what happened in 2012 after the Journal of Medical Ethics published “After Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. The article argues, á la Singer, that infants are not “persons,” and hence—harking back to Fletcher—“after-birth abortion” is morally permissible.80 But unlike many infanticide-promoting articles, Giubilini and Minerva confront head-on the question of whether healthy and able-bodied babies can be killed, arguing that whatever justifies abortion—and in the USA, that means anything and everything—also supports a right for parents to have unwanted born babies painlessly killed.
Such logic flows easily from the rejection of the idea that human life matters morally simply because it is human. Moreover, that premise allows rank bootstrapping to justify expanding the killing license. Never mind that abortion wasn’t legalized to grant a woman the “right” to a dead fetus but to ensure a woman’s right to control her own body. Thus once the baby is born, the entire issue of protecting “choice” should be factually irrelevant.
But having blithely dismissed intrinsic human value, the authors easily inflate autonomy to include a putative right not to be personally inconvenienced or burdened by the infant or the child she would later become. And since an infant isn’t a “person”—having yet to develop desires or goals—the baby’s life is of secondary concern to the desires of her mother.
The article is too lengthy to completely recount, but here are a few representative excerpts:
• “In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion,’ rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus . . . rather than that of a child.”
• “Therefore we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all circumstances where abortion would be.”
• “If the death of a newborn is not wrongful to her on the grounds that she cannot have formed any aim that she is prevented from accomplishing, then it should also be permissible to practice after-birth abortion on a healthy newborn too.”
• “Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.”
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