Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has picked Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. Walz recently legalized infanticide in the state of Minnesota. As someone who does not identify as conservative, I’d be delighted if this claim could be dismissed as a right-wing fever dream. Unfortunately, it is all too real. And by infanticide, I really do mean aiming at the death of newborn infants.
A bit of history. Before Christian ethics became dominant in the West, infanticide was considered (along with abortion) a legitimate way to control reproduction. In ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, the abandonment of newborn infants (usually because they were female or disabled) was even systematized—with certain places designated as baby abandonment spaces. Very often such babies were killed by exposure or wild animals, but sometimes they were picked up by those who raised them as slaves or prostitutes.
The practice was apparently so prevalent that one reason ancient Christians warned against visiting prostitutes was because there was a decent chance the woman could be a family member. These ancient Christians not only adopted many of these exposed infants and raised them as their own, but the earliest Catechism we have, the Didache, responds to the signs of those times by insisting that Christians must not “murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”
Many moral philosophers of our own era who have explicitly rejected this Christian vision of the dignity and equality of every single human life—and instead focused only on creatures who have certain traits (rationality, self-awareness, etc.)—have, unsurprisingly, embraced the pre-Christian view of infanticide as a morally legitimate way to control birth. Thinkers like Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, Jeff McMahon, Eduard Verhaegen, Pieter Sauer, Alberto Giubilini, Francesca Minerva (and several others) have affirmed this view publicly. The prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics even dedicated an entire issue to infanticide back in 2013.
In that issue, Prof. Robert George and I explored our disagreement about whether the whole concept of infanticide is “madness.” On the one hand, I very much agree—given the vision of the good present in the Didache—that infanticide is morally mad. But according to the vision of the good adopted by our repaganizing Western culture, the right to infanticide follows logically from the right to abortion. On this view, merely being Homo sapiens—whether inside or outside of the womb—doesn’t grant one moral or legal status. Indeed, some prenatal human beings (say at 28 weeks gestation) are more developed and sophisticated than are neonatal human beings born prematurely (say, at 23 weeks).
Which brings us to Tim Walz, now the Democratic nominee for vice president, and his legalization of infanticide in Minnesota. In 2023, Walz supported an omnibus health bill that radically changed his state’s abortion law. This health bill, in a callback to the ancient practice of abandoning newborns, intentionally and explicitly legalized the denial of life-saving medical care to infants born alive after botched abortions. State law used to explicitly protect these babies. But Walz and his supporters changed it, insisting that references to abortion be removed and that “medical care” be changed to mere “care.” In addition, while the original law required medical personnel to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant,” the Walz-supported change struck that whole line—it now requires medical personnel merely to “care for the infant who is born alive.”
No more requirements to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant after a botched abortion. Got it.
New York state did something similar in passing its Reproductive Health Act. That state originally required two physicians to be present at an abortion after viability to “ensure the health and safety of the mother and viable child” if there were an accidental birth. But the 2019 law explicitly removed this requirement of protection for the newborn infant. Readers may also be familiar with a similar 2019 bill in Virginia which then Governor Ralph Northam said would allow the following: “The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
This kind of intentional non-treatment of newborns so they die is now routine in our culture. Gov. Northam admitted it. The state of Minnesota also admitted it via their state records. I also wrote a detailed article for Public Discourse that demonstrates just how often this happens, especially (but not only) when the baby has an unwanted disability. For instance, I show how in one case a family was given a life-limiting diagnosis (spina bifida) for their child prenatally—and then, after fending off repeated and aggressive suggestions that they ought to have an abortion, being told that they could wait until her son was born and withhold treatment then.
Again, withholding life-sustaining treatment because the baby is “too disabled and we want them to die now” is fairly common in today’s neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Yale bioethicist and neonatologist Mark Mercurio writes in the Journal of Perinatology that most neonatologists and other physicians have some cases in which they will withhold life-sustaining medical care because the patient is too disabled and other cases in which they will not. Their research found that, for a younger baby, life-sustaining treatment will be routinely withheld, but for an older child it will not be, even if both children have the same health issues and potential for long-term disability.
The reason for this, Mercurio suggests, is because the younger child lacks “the interpersonal attachment that older babies and children have,” and health care providers may not consider him or her “to have the same personhood as older infants who went home.” Indeed, he says that some physicians think of themselves as “saving” the older child who already has a disability, but “creating” a person with a disability if they successfully treat the newborn.
Obviously, such a view makes little sense if a newborn infant is equal in dignity and value to those of us who are older, but the fact that aiming at the death of newborns in this way is now routine in Western NICUs is yet another indicator of our repaganizing. We no longer think that being human is enough. Something else is required—and newborn human beings don’t have it. Peter Singer and many contemporary secular philosophers think so. Contemporary medicine thinks so. And the Democratic nominee for vice president of the United States thinks so.
Charles C. Camosy is a professor of medical humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine and a moral theology fellow at St. Joseph Seminary in New York.
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Image by Lorie Shaull, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
