Question Does Peter Singer really advocate/defend infanticide under certain circumstances? I recently read that he argues that parents should be able to abort mentally handicapped newborns or even to have a thirty day waiting period with which to decide whether or not they want to keep the child. Is this true and if so does this show a progression of the pro-choice stance on abortion extending beyond the womb?

Accepted:
April 15, 2010

Comments

I don't know if this is Singer's view or not. I just want to respond to the suggestion that the view "shows a progression of the pro-choice stance on abortion extending beyond the womb." Do not buy the facile and cynical "slippery slope" argument advanced by some unscrupulous people that holds that any principle that justifies abortion in any circumstances will lead inexorably to a validation of heinous practices like murder of unwanted children or elderly adults.

The term "pro-choice" refers to a particular political position: it is the position that the decision whether to continue a pregnancy should be made the pregnant person, not the government. People who are pro-choice do not necessarily agree on the morality of abortion -- they do not all agree on the conditions in which abortion is morally permissible, and they may not even agree that abortion is ever morally permissible. (Many members of the organization Catholics for Free Choice believe on theological grounds that abortion is wrong, but also believe that the government should not enshrine any one theological belief into law. Most Catholics who I know take the same position on divorce.)

Even those who agree that abortion is morally permissible under the same conditions may disagree about the reasons why. Some defenders of abortion see the issue in terms of liberty -- no person has the right to use my body without my permission, even if they need my body to survive. Others would say that a person does have the right to use my body if he or she needs it to survive, but that a fetus is not (yet) a person. Singer is a utilitarian: he believes that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the amount of utility the action would produce. But that means that he has to assess and compare the utilities that would be produced by various courses of action. In the case of a mentally handicapped infant (and I imagine Singer is talking about severe handicap, like microencephaly, or Tay-Sachs), Singer is assuming that sustaining the infant's life would not produce very much utility -- for the infant as well as for the parent -- and that ending the life would prevent needless suffering and the expenditure of resources that could be used elsewhere. Not every utilitarian, however, is going to agree with Singer's assessment of the relative utilities of saving the infant and killing the infant.

You can find out about Singer's position on infanticide here--

http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html