>>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.
I haven't seen the paper where Singer is supposed to have adopted the infanticide position, but I'd be surprised if he didn't say something like, at about a month, when incipicient ratioonality starts to develop. His poimt is not to propose a legal rfule, but to makea moral point, namely, that line draw\ing in this area is hard.
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?
Well, I take it that he thinks that factory farming and animal experimentation is unnecessarily painful to animals; painless killing of free-range animals would be much less objectionable.l As to babies, he'd think that killing babies in ways that involved causing them unnecessary pain was very bad.
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.
Actually in human history the three main reasons are (a) the baby is a girla and not a boy; (b) the mother is unmarried and would be disgraced, or (c) there isn't enough food for another mouth.
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.
I guess you've gone to other other extreme, since the lines can't be nicely drawn, abortion must be immoral. Of course this has certain consequences for women's liberation.
--jks