JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> Singer's not singling out disabled babies. He thinks that it's as OK to kill
> _any_ one-month old, disabled or not, as it is to kill any nonrational animal.
> His point is line-drawing is hard. From a moral point of view--obviously he's
> not arguing law, since he; not an idiot; he recognizes that legallys peaking
> killing a newborn is murder--but from a moral point of view, it's very hard to
> say why late term abortion should be OK and infanticide (of any newborns, even
> healthy and normal ones) should not be. Singer thinks late terma bortions are
> OK, so he concludes that from a moral point of infanticide must be.
>
OK I understand that it is hard to draw a line between days before and after birth. But it is equally hard to draw a line between a 30 day old baby and a 32 day old baby.
There are many inconsistencies in Singer's rationales- such as what is the difference in the pain quotient between the killing of an animal (Singer's reason we should not kill animals) and the pain quotient of killing an infant?
One last comment on Singer's position that it is OK to kill any baby - disabled or not - under one month old. Common sense tells us that if parents do not want a baby they would abort (pre birth) rather than carrying a baby that they did not want to term. So, then why on earth would someone carry a baby to term and then kill it if they did not want ANY baby at all? The reason one would want to kill an infant after it was born would most likely be because they did not like the *particular* baby they got. With pre screening widely available, abortion has become a search and destroy mission to get rid of the disabled fetus. So even though Singer does not state this explicitly, he is developing the ethical grounds to extend this practice from abortion to birthed babies.
> The philosopher Michael Tooley has developed Singer's thought at great length
> in his book Abortion and Infanticide.
Thanks for this reference.
Marta Russell