I was asked several months ago by Human Life Review to react to Peter Singer’s presentation at Princeton University’s conference on abortion, in which pro life and pro choice advocates exchanged views and respectfully debated. I wrote about that here at SHS (also here), but the HLR offered an opportunity to expound at greater length.
The issue is now out, and my piece available online. First, I oppose comparing Singer to Hitler and the Nazis. From “Infanticide Must be Combatted—Carefully” (citations omitted):
Defenders of Peter Singer like to say that his critics are just too dull to understand what he is really saying. As proof, Singer’s defenders note that opponents of his views often compare him to Hitler. And it is true: Some are so appalled by his advocacy for the permissibility of infanticide that they reflexively wield der Führer’s bones as relics of evil against him, thinking the analogy a sure-fire argument winner. It isn’t. Singer is not a Nazi. Moreover, most people today roll their eyes at any and all Hitler comparisons as hyperbolic clichés. Besides, the infanticide Holocaust that took place in Germany between 1939 and 1945 was more the poisonous fruit of decades of eugenics advocacy than it was the result of tyrannical political leadership.
Also note: The language of eugenics was harsh and hate-filled, e.g., “the fit versus the unfit,” calling babies with disabilities “weeds,” and the like. In contrast, Singer and his supporters don’t spout vilification of “useless eaters” from the rooftop. Instead, they speak passively and seemingly ooze compassion, which effectively shields them against widespread censure. Alas, in our unprincipled, postmodern era, one can support (and engage in) the most odious actions and still be praised—so long as the actions are justified as prevention of suffering. If you doubt it, just look at the recent rehabilitation of Jack Kevorkian—who wanted to experiment on people being euthanized2—yet was the subject of a recent fawning HBO biopic in which he was portrayed by Al Pacino.
I then get into what Singer said at Princeton. I discuss how he had previously walked back his “kill by 30 days” approach, but still hoped that “maybe” (the usual hedge) parents could authorize infanticide for severely disabled babies for a period of time after birth. I suggested that this was a tactical shift undertaken for political reasons rather than a change in his value system—as demonstrated by his view that a child does not attain “full moral status” until age 2.
Then, I explored how Singer’s tying together abortion and infanticide—neither fetuses nor infants, in his view, are persons—could result in the latter becoming as accepted as the former:
But it is folly to think that Singer doesn’t eventually want his ideas implemented: He is too serious an intellectual and knows that the law eventually reflects our moral values. Thus, once the very young were deemed by society to be intrinsically unequal—another way of describing denial of full moral status—radical changes in public policy would follow as naturally as water flowing downhill. Singer made that very point at the conference, albeit between the lines. Purporting to respect the seriousness of the pro-life position against legal abortion, he said: “The position that allows abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances. . . . If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life.”
This is very telling. Abortion was once widely condemned and universally proscribed by law except for medical reasons. It is now broadly accepted and considered a fundamental right throughout the West, in large part because our perception of the moral value of fetal life changed. Thus, if we ever accept Singer’s views that children, perhaps past the age of two, do not possess full moral status, it would similarly change our perceptions about the wrongness of their killing, leading ultimately to dramatic changes in morality and law. (This is already happening in the Netherlands, where infanticide—while technically murder—is so widely accepted that Dutch doctors who euthanize babies published the “Groningen Protocol,” a bureaucratic infanticide checklist for use in deciding which babies can be ethically euthanized.)
Now, we can see the game that is afoot. Singer still wants infanticide to be legal—as he mentioned at the conference almost as an aside—and he is betting that if he can convince us that there is no real difference between abortion and infanticide, our current cultural attachment to the former will be the key that opens the door to accepting the latter.
I discuss how that might look, and then conclude with how to best keep infanticide from becoming normalized:
The question thus becomes, how best to combat Singer-style anti-humanism. As I mentioned earlier, it can’t be with Hitler. That trope will merely bounce off people’s foreheads. Rather, the answer lies in Martin Luther King liberalism—pounding on the invidiously discriminatory nature of Singer-style utilitarian measurements of human life and defending a robust acceptance of human exceptionalism as the necessary predicate for universal human rights. Indeed, accepting Peter Singer’s thesis is, by definition, a rejection of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
Opposing infanticide is deemed a conservative position. If that is true, it is only because the nature of liberalism has changed.
