When I was in medical school in the early 1980s, I saw a number of people die. But I only saw one human being deliberately killed. On a surgical rotation in my second or third year, two or three of us were instructed to go to another hospital in town and observe a procedure. We dutifully lined up against the back wall of an operating room and watched as a woman underwent some sort of suction procedure. It was only later that I was sickened to learn that what we had really witnessed was an abortion—one of 52 million that have been performed in this country.
Not that abortion is anything new. It was practiced in the ancient world. And the Romans and Greeks took it one stage further. When a baby was born, the midwife would lay it on the ground; if the pater familias picked it up, he recognized it as his own. If he didn’t, it was taken away and left by the wayside, to be claimed by anyone who wanted it. Or it died. Only a few odd groups (Egyptians, Germans, Jews, and Christians) kept all their children. The Christians were even known to rescue and raise abandoned children. Eventually, Christianity displaced paganism, and infanticide was outlawed in ad 374.
Ah, but that was two thousand years ago. Times have changed.
Or perhaps not.
Weird Science
In February 2012 a controversial article appeared in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. Not that infanticide hadn’t been advocated before—Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and ethicist Peter Singer (among others) have defended the practice. And infanticide is still performed in countries such as India and China which lack a Judeo-Christian foundation for morality.
But what made the article more controversial than usual was that the authors didn’t limit infanticide only to newborns unable or unlikely to survive. Rather, what they called “afterbirth abortion” could be permissible for all the same reasons as an abortion, including mental or emotional distress to the mother, the family feeling unable to raise the child, the child being of the “wrong” sex, or because of concerns about overpopulation, etc.
They based their conclusion firstly on the moral equivalence of the pre-born fetus and the newborn infant.
Catholics and other Christians who believe that life begins at conception would certainly concur with this assessment— both unborn and newborn possess equal value.
The authors take this in the opposite direction, however, claiming that both are equally valueless, because in their view neither can be considered a person in a morally relevant sense. Therefore, what can be done to a fetus (abortion) can be done to a newborn (“afterbirth abortion”).
Definition of Terms
Why isn’t the newborn a “person”? The authors claim that while both a fetus and a newborn are human beings, they’re only “potential persons” because to be a person means to have the capability to attribute value to one’s own existence, the deprivation of which represents a loss.
Some higher animals or mentally handicapped individuals might be persons (depending on the extent of their mental capacity), but not healthy newborns, who have not developed many of the traits associated with personhood and who don’t have the capability to have aims—who don’t understand what it would mean to be deprived of life.
Simply being a human is not enough to grant someone a right to life. Rather, it is the “actual” people who could be affected either positively or negatively by the birth of a child whose rights take precedence.
Infants, they say, can become persons (at some undefined age), because they have potential and at some point can make aims and appreciate their own life. Since therefore, fetuses and newborns are only “potential persons” (not “actual persons”), then if they never become “actual persons”, no harm is done by killing them. But don’t “potential persons” have the right to become “actual persons”? No, say the authors, because the interests of actual persons outweigh those of the merely “potential.” Actual persons have to pursue their own well-being, which might be threatened by having to care for “potential persons.”
The Moral Highground
Whether or not a newborn has value is thus up to Mom, Dad, the State . . . quite similar to Roman times.
It is a logical step from denying the moral significance of the unborn to denying the moral significance of the newborn. The Catholic Church— and Christians in general—have understood this connection between the unborn and the newborn from the very beginning.
The Didache (an early Christian document likely dating from the second half of the first century) says, “You shall not murder a child, whether it be born or unborn.” And the Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, emphasizes, “Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception; abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”
Martin Rhonheimer, Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, pointed out the main fallacy behind the authors’ argument for infanticide as lying in the idea that personhood is a property of a human being that develops over time, that a “potential person” becomes an “actual person.”
What the Church teaches, however, is that a human being is a person who develops the properties of personhood as he or she grows and develops. It is personal behavior that develops, not personhood itself.
The authors are putting the cart before the horse. Their opinion that, “I develop the properties of a person, therefore I become a person,” should be, “I am a person, therefore I develop the properties of a person.”
It is fairly obvious that not one of us has fully developed every possibility that we have. Yet we are all persons. The unborn fetus and newborn child are not “potential persons” but “persons with potential.” They are actual persons who possess the capability to grow and develop in terms of reason, self-awareness, love, and relationships.
Should Helen Keller have been killed because her deafness and blindness made her a “non-person” unable to communicate with the world around her? Should Oscar Pistorius, running in the 2012 Olympics on artificial legs because of a birth defect, have been eliminated as a non-person because he lacked the athletic potential of a “normal” child?
Unfortunately, even some Christian groups have fallen into the trap of not ascribing full humanity to all persons. Consider the strict predestinarians, who adopted the idea that God had created certain individuals as “vessels of wrath” to populate hell. An unbaptized child (one who was not old enough to answer for him or herself) was only a potential member of the Christian community, and death in infancy indicated that he or she was not meant to be saved. Catholic baptism, on the other hand, acknowledged that the child was an actual member of the Christian community, one possessing potential for growth in the spiritual life.
One Thing Leads to Another
Infanticide is not the final step that might be taken in this progression beyond abortion, however.
If the unborn and the unwanted newborn are truly not persons (might we equate the elderly with diminishing mental faculties with them, also?), and no harm is done in killing them, then why not (as one commentator sarcastically wrote) recycle them? The use of fetal stem cells sounds clinical and sophisticated, but why stop there? Why not create babies for “spare parts”? Or go even further. . . .
Remember the 1973 dystopic science fiction movie Soylent Green? Why did those in control of New York City’s food supply keep the details secret? Guess what everyone is eating. . . .
Logically, if one accepts the authors’ definition of personhood, it follows. It’s efficient, it’s utilitarian, and if we’re simply soulless hunks of walking meat, produced by a blind, purposeless, meaningless, and indifferent universe, why not? Why be squeamish?
Winston Churchill (for one) stated that the degree of civilization of a society could be measured by how it treated its weakest members. What kind of society can we expect to develop if we abandon our Judeo-Christian principles and adopt—whether intentionally or by indifference—the likes of those proposed by Giubilini and Minerva? A degenerating society, Churchill asserted, would lose its morals.
In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Bl. John Paul II wrote, “Against the spirit of the world, the Church takes up anew each day a struggle that is none other than the struggle for the world’s soul.”
Abortion and infanticide are only the outward manifestations of a deeper conflict. The struggle for the world’s soul also involves our own souls, and those of every other human being—unborn, newborn, and mature.
Even now, thirty years later, sometimes I wonder who the person I saw destroyed that day in medical school might have become.
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