Uh-oh! Infanticide is Back

Why not? asks bioethicist in leading journal

Michael Cook, Editor
MercatorNet


Arguments which frame infanticide as a moral option have plunged bioethicists into hot water in recent years. In 2012, two bioethicists argued in a leading journal that a foetus and a new-born infant are only potential persons without any interests. Therefore the interests of those involved with them are paramount until some indefinite time after birth. They called killing the baby “after-birth abortion” rather than infanticide. Same difference, but it does sound better.

The hoi polloi outside the ivory tower may not be opposed to abortion, but the word “infanticide” is incendiary. To their amazement, the bioethicists were heaped with criticism in newspapers and websites around the world.

But we haven’t heard the end of arguments for infanticide, probably because it is a logical extension of academic arguments for abortion.

The latest instalment comes in an on-line-first article in the journal Bioethics in which Joona Räsänen, a Finnish bioethicist at the University of Oslo, defends the moral possibility of infanticide. (Listen up, people! This does not imply a campaign to implement or legalise infanticide, only its theoretical morality.)


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