What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?

Question

Many people accept abortion on the grounds that foetuses aren't persons, and that personhood is what defines the right to life. I've always been intrigued about what defines personhood; obviously attributes like consciousness (or the ability to suffer) and personal identity seem to play a role.

Some would say you can abort a foetus because it has no sense of personal identity, it can feel no pain and its death will have a net positive effect. But could you not make this argument for a toddler?

A toddler has hardly any rational faculties, it certainly has no developed sense of identity, and if you had a method of killing it painlessly, what would be wrong with that (say, if the toddler was draining an already financially struggling and drug addicted single mother)? Obviously the thought of this seems reprehensible, but where is the philosophical line here?

Answer 1

A toddler can (with a minimal amount of assistance) continue living and developing on its own. Setting aside that you underestimate the cognitive capacities of infants, an infant is a fully formed and biologically functional entity. A fetus is not; it cannot breathe, consume food, or perform any of the necessary biological functions for survival outside the womb. At the end of the first trimester — the normal Western upper limit for abortion — a fetus is roughly 1.5 inches long, and has a partially developed brain that is far smaller than that of the average chicken (you know, those birds we slaughter by the tens of billions every year).

Put a newborn on the ground and walk away, and it will survive perfectly well (for a while at least) until someone comes and finds it. Put a fetus on the ground and walk away, and it will cease to function before you've taken ten steps.

Let's be frank. The notion of 'personhood' in the abortion debate has distinctly different meanings on the Right and the Left. On the Left, personhood is a secular moral argument about the rights and privileges of individuals within society; on the Right, personhood generally means that an individual 'has a soul.' It is not at all clear that non-viable fetuses have the rights and privileges of individuals within a society, since they are neither individuals nor properly within society until after they are born. It is fairly well established, in fact, that even young children do not share all of the rights and privileges of personhood, since they are considered incompetent; most of children's rights and privileges defer to their parents or guardians. And as far as having a soul goes, every cultural group I know of — including Christianity prior to fundamentalist revisionism — placed the entry of the soul into the child at the point where the fetus 'quickens', which occurs roughly at the end of the first trimester. Fundamentalists have tried to push back the entry of the soul to the moment of conception in a kind of mishmash of biological pseudoscience, but if we dismiss that then there are absolutely no 'personhood' considerations to address.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not fond of the practice of abortion; in my view it should be a procedure of last resort. But it is a necessary option to preserve the 'personhood' of women in a world that has a long history of treating women as chattel. If you ask me to pit the actual personhood of a woman against the potential and speculative personhood of a fetus, I will come down on the side of the 'actual' every time.

Answer 2

There's no one answer to your question, because this is a live debate, and different thinkers have very different moral intuitions about it. Traditional Catholic theology represents perhaps the position most to the end of one extreme, that the fetus should be treated as a full person (regardless of its actual ontological status) from the very moment of conception.

At the other end of the spectrum, utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer is perhaps the visible figure who has most fully embraced your exact line of reasoning with all its uncomfortable ramifications --in his point of view, a young child, an intelligent animal, and a mentally disabled adult should all be viewed as essentially equivalent based on their intellectual capacities and respective abilities to live a rich life. He would argue that if it is justified to kill any one of those, it would be justified to kill any of the others given the necessary equivalences --in other words, that the mere fact of personhood (in terms of biological membership in the human species) doesn't invoke any special protections or privileges. This is also the basis of his arguments in favor of animal rights.

Answer 3

First, a toddler is a child in the technical sense approximately between 12-36 months year old. If you're looking for a counter argument to your specific wording:

Some would say you can abort a foetus because it has no sense of personal identity, it can feel no pain and its death will have a net positive effect. But could you not make this argument for a toddler?

Then it's important to point out that while strictly speaking, one can make claims that a fetus until the third trimester doesn't feel pain based on it's development, but that one might not be make the same claim can for toddlers. Anecdotally, a toddler is capable of intentionality to the point that it can offer propositions such as "Daddy, my knee hurts". A fetus can do no such thing, and therefore the informal argument immediately suffers from weakness in it's premises undermining it's overall cogency.

Another riposte to the argument is the presumption that toddlers have "hardly any rational faculties" or that they possess "no sense of identity". I'm on my third toddler, and anecdotely, by 3 children develop the ability not only to reason superficially, but do so with acumen often exposing the hypocrisy of words relative to the motivations of adults. This is such a common phenomenon, there's a phrase in English for it. "From the mouths of babes!" As for identity, I can only proffer that children's notion of identity begins before becoming verbal. In developmental psychology, the number cited for self-awareness in a psychological fashion happens months out of the womb. From Child Development: An Introduction, page 545:

Age in months: 0-3 Interest in social objects; emergence of self-other distinction
Age in months: 3-8 Consolidation of self-other distinction, recognition of self through contengency
Age in months: 8-12 Emergence of self-permanence and self categories; recognition of self through contingency and onset of feature recognition.

I would say that these three counterattacks on premises are enough to make the argument barely cogent and expose the argument as merely prima facie.

One might try to recover the thesis with some form of solipsism which presumes that fetuses and toddlers aren't people with minds which would be extreme, or one could create doubt as to the seriousnes of whether suffering of fetuses and toddlers is meaningful if one questions the nature of their minds along lines of attack in problem of other minds.

One can also attack the enthymeme in the loose sense, by attacking the implied premise that all toddlers deserve to live and be pain free. Certainly in-group and out-group thinking could lay the ground for two different moralities, one for the in-group and the other for the out-group, hence SOME toddlers should be euthanized and SOME should not on criteria other than you mention.

In my estimation, another place of the argument might be strengthened is by arguing that the goodness that comes from the death of the infant outweighs other concerns. Will the death of the infant save a thousand others, or perhaps the entire species? Will the death of the infant lead to a cure for cancer? As undesirable as it is in contemporaneous times, the practice that it is moral to sacrifice one's children for God or gods goes back a long way is woven into the Judeo-Christian religion itself.

Answer 4

To answer the question in the title, the matter of abortion revolves around two aspects: the killing of a developing human and the capacity to which a pregnant woman has bodily autonomy. So a moral decision on abortion must consider the dilemma of bodily autonomy and feticide. On the other hand infanticide involves only the killing of an infant. So, the moral dilemma is more straight forward.

Regarding the topic in your post, I think personhood can be simplified down to "individuality" in the sense of how we see two human beings as unique based on their behaviour, personality, and other cognitive functions. With respect to that definition, fetuses in the early stages could be considered by some as indistinguishable from one another like a zygote or a blastocyst, whereas infants--despite having limited cognition, demonstrate unique attributes in terms of their likes, dislikes, what they allow, disallow, personality, how they react to different stimuli etc. making them "persons".

I think this fine line is similar to how some people in Western culture will run into a burning building to save their dog, but are ok with raise young cattle for slaughter. This is likely because they see their dog as a unique creature with respect to other dogs, but all cows are just "cows" thus making it easier to sacrifice a cow for meat.

Answer 5

I'll offer an emphatic answer by Philip K. Dick. Wikipedia claims without corroboration that it is a response to the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade.

In his chilling story "The Pre-Persons"¹ Dick illustrates his opinion that there is no ethical difference between aborting fetuses and killing children. A critic noted:

But even wry smiles fade with "The Pre-Persons" and its futuristic comment on abortion laws. The title hints at the core question: when does a human organism attain true identity? Hyperbole dramatizes the issue as Dick's future society names age twelve as the time when a human being acquires soul and thus is rendered inviolate.

In the story, all children up to the age of twelve live under the constant threat of being "aborted" by their parents; occasionally a truck roams the neighborhood and one of their playmates is gone.

---

_{¹ I'm not sure about the copyright situation (the story is 45 years old and still available in anthologies), but there are a few PDFs online if you look for it.}

Answer 6

There's some great philosophy written on this topic (see Thomson). Suffice to say, even if you assume that a fetus is a child, a pregnant person still has the right to terminate the pregnancy. The difference is in how the two bodies relate to each other, and the mechanics of how support is provided.

Put simply:

No one can force you to donate blood. However, donating blood saves lives; if you choose not to donate blood, are you guilty of murder? No, of course not.

Similarly, a woman has the right to cease donating blood to a fetus. That has the consequence of ending the pregnancy. If the fetus is not viable without that blood (and other resources) then the result is an abortion.

For an infant, it's no longer a matter of donating blood; the infant is not literally living off of the parent's body. The parent can choose to give up responsibility for the child and put it up for adoption without resulting in the death of the child. Neglect of a child, while maintaining responsibility for it (that is, not putting up for adoption), is a crime (because it is not fulfilling a responsibility that has been accepted).

Basically, the 'death' of the fetus is not the purpose of enforcing the right to bodily autonomy, but can be a result (depending on viability); infanticide, however, implies specific (malicious) intent.

Answer 7

This remains a subjective debate and it is impossible to draw a clear line, due to the paradox of the heap (also known as the sorites paradox)

If a heap of sand is reduced by a single grain at a time, at what exact point does it cease to be considered a heap?

Similarly, if it is not morally acceptable to kill a toddler, is it acceptable to kill it when it was one second younger? One hour younger? If it is not morally acceptable to kill a newborn, is it acceptable to kill the baby one second before being born? Two seconds? Ten?

Wherever you draw the line where a fetus younger than that is acceptable to be killed and a fetus older than that is not, you inevitably bounce into the problem of two fetuses, one slightly older and one slightly younger, where the two are completely indistinguishable yet one would be morally totally acceptable to be killed, while the other not.

Therefore this question cannot have a clear and precise line, and especially not a line which can unanimously be drawn.

Answer 8

where is the philosophical line here?

There is no such line post-conception. Human life is initiated at conception, and only disease, injury, natural and innate responses to inviability can terminate the life from progressing and growing in utero. Voluntarily invoking such termination constitutes elective abortion. The fact that the child is dependent on his or her mother (and father) until he or she has reached many facets of developmental maturity does not lessen his or her identity nor the impact of terminating that life.

We would be well-served by asking the question, "What would happen to this child if nature took its course?" Nature includes natural family relations and responsibilities. Interventions that improve the likelihood and quality of life for mother and child are commendable. Interventions that do the opposite for either one are damnable. We declare ourselves to be morally inferior to brute beasts if we destroy our offspring. This is what life is: It is offspring. It grows, it matures, it has some opportunity to thrive within its sphere. Interruption or cessation of that process is rightly called taking a life.

It is incumbent upon all who have feeling hearts and a still-active conscience to share the means of living with their nearest of kin so that no lack of stupid paper money or any other material object or metaphysical desire ever devolves into a pretended justification of murder. Extended family should be relied upon when immediate relatives are absent or cannot provide the needed support. We are all related, we are all connected, and justification and nobility follow the conscious and courageous choice to save a life from the jaws of despair or neglect.

Having sexual relations causes the male and female involved to enter into a non-negotiable contract under immutable and eternal law to care and provide for the offspring that arise or that could arise from such activity. Mortal life begins at conception through the means appointed. Once initiated, nothing can stop the inexorable growth and progress of life but disease or death. Intentionally terminating viable human life resulting from even partially consensual sex whether in or out of the womb is and ought to be a crime against humanity and to be prosecuted as such.

Until people take responsibility for their sexual acts through the societal contract of marriage and family formation, they will increasingly be impelled towards murder and bloodlust in a vain attempt to erase the natural consequences of their actions.

Answer 9

While a great number of arguments have been advanced in an attempt to justify elective abortion (we'll lay aside the rape/incest/danger to the health of the mother cases for now since those are a minority and a somewhat distinct can of worms), none of them are particularly convincing. Many examples exist of human beings that cannot feel pain, possess no true sense of self-awareness, cannot survive on their own, etc. that any reasonable, sane person would not feel comfortable judging as "not a person" or unentitled to live. I can empathize with the typical arguments related to women's rights, but those cannot hold in the case of voluntary sexual activity in light of the above arguments.

I'm afraid that in a sense, abortion is the (American) Left's equivalent of climate change denial; inconvenient facts are distorted and rationalized away in an attempt to justify current behaviors.

(Update based on comments) Nor is the fact that many governing bodies condone and/or promote the practice of abortion proof of its moral rectitude/acceptability. Governing bodies throughout history (including those of first-world countries in recent history) have promoted many practices that we now denounce as wrong - Japanese internment during WWII, pogroms, the excesses of the McCarthy era, the execution of political opponents, etc, so governmental support cannot be taken as proof of moral rightness, regardless of whether or not those decisionmakers are genuinely convinced of the rightness of their decisions.

Answer 10

In the grand scheme of things, disallowing abortion would be similar to forced kidney transplants to relatives,. If your relative is sick and can only survive with your kidney, is society morally obliged to take yours? Or is that tyrannical, by itself, even with justification? So, the question of the morality of having an abortion and the morality of disallowing abortion can be separate, and can both be wrong or right by their own merits.

Answer 11

We are trying to present a difference between two persons to kill one of them. That's totally normal. We kill people in war, we kill on the road, we kill people with pollution. We tolerate the deaths. Because these deaths are for a greater goal: Security, Freedom, Wealth.

We don't tolerate murder. As opposed to the above, a murder is killing for the personal benefit of the single murderer.

You are allowed to kill, when you belong to a tolerated group. e.g. Army, Cardriver, Energyprovider ...

We have a pretty weird morality when we talk about killing. This could be solved. Imagine two worlds:

a) Killing is totally legal. At best every human behaves in a form that there will be no reason for the other human to kill him. A world of eremites?

b) Killing is not tolerated in any case That would mean that the reasons for killing must be nullified. Eg we have to provide enough social workers, that conflicts would be solved early enough. We should share our wealth that there is no reason for other countries to attack us. We should provide technical barriers that cars can't kill ...

To solve the problem of abortion, we should not try make difference between different stages of fetal development. We either declare it as legal. Because we cannot make the difference between a child in a first world country or a child in Kabul. Both would be killed by a person.

Or ...

We declare all life as precious. Than we should begin to give mothers a chance to raise the kid in without loosing income, social status or freedom. This would afford a massive investion in healthcare, psychological assists, jobs ... And we have to get rid of all weapons, armies, ...

Tell me the difference between a child killed on the road, a child killed by a bomb, a child starved from hunger and a child killed in a womb.

No, don't tell me, tell it the desperate mother. Tell her from face to face. In private, when you are empathic enough to listen to her sorrows.

I couldn't tell her.

Answer 12

It's hard to argue scientifically that a child's sense of identity and ability to feel pain is 'turned on' at the very moment of birth. Or at any other point. The boundary between abortion and infanticide is an artificial legal and moral construct. And, as we know, some legal and/or moral systems place the cut-off point some time before birth, even as far back as the moment of conception.

As far as I know, none place it AFTER birth. 'My parents wanted to have me aborted. But they were told it was too late, I'd started school' is a joke.

So the answer to the question - as is stated IN the question - can only be that the moral difference is wherever a community chooses to put it. Few moral issues are absolute. Though communities often like to claim that THEIRS are, even when circumstance makes otherwise plainly evident! :-)

Answer 13

A way to lower the emotional aspects this question evokes and yet maintain the logical aspects would be not to talk about toddlers but kittens. So, what is the logical difference between: to kill a kitten for no reason versus to kill a cat fetus for no reason?

To answer this question, I list the differences and similarities between and a cat fetus and a kitten

Differences between cat fetus and kitten: (location) The kitten is outside the mother the fetus is inside the mother (age) The kitten is older than the fetus (size) Fetus is small kitten is bigger (abilities) Kitten can do more things than the fetus

Similarities between cat fetus and kitten: (uniqueness) The fetus and the kitten are unique; they are not biologically part of the mother (basic needs) To stay alive and grow the fetus and the kitten only need food and shelter (keeping alive) For the fetus the mother provides food and shelter automatically; feeding and protecting a kitten is also an automatic instinctive act of the mother (state of being) The fetus and kitten are alive (completeness) Kitten and fetus are genetically complete (state of development) Kitten and fetus do not yet have all the attributes of an adult cat (potential) In time kitten and fetus can reach same level of development (biological branch) Fetus and kitten are cats

The similarities between cat fetuses and kittens are greater than their differences. The differences only refer to location, age, size and abilities; thus, in essence, they are trivial. These differences are also present between kittens and adult cats. Therefore, if it is against the law to kill kittens for no reason it should also be against the law kill cat fetuses for no reason.

Answer 14

Now I had to register an account here as well as I feel most answers are lacking in tackling step one of answering the question. The question is for a moral difference. A perception of right and wrong. Most here seem to grasp the complexity of the question and the effort it entails to actually form a moral standpoint about this. I have no proof, but believe that most with an opinion has not put enough effort into the question to come up with a view of their own, but rather adopted a view. In such cases I would argue that it is not a moral standpoint, but a religious or political one. (No, I did not put this last in only to generate comments to my answer.)

To look at it from each individuals view point is of course not a viable option here, but some possible examples might serve to indicate the scope of the question and why it should most definitely be broken down into smaller components (unless a specific individuals moral compass is sought).

First you have the definition of life. A fetus, like a toddler is a life and therefore it is wrong to take a life by having an abortion. Moral priority is on all life is sacred coupled with a definition of a fetus as a separate living organism. This argument is fundamentally a fanatical approach that many people seem to reference but none live up to. We all take life by living and it is an inescapable fact. What is meant is usually that it is a human individual and as such must not be killed. Here is where the whole debate enters a territory of what is an individual and morality then becomes a question of how to define something as complex as a person which is then simplified by most to be manageable.

Another consideration is area of responsibility. A fetus is a part of an individual, like the cecum. While the toddler has been separated and has its own place in society. To debate morals from this perspective then becomes a matter of drawing the line between an individuals rights and obligations.

With only the two highly simplified examples above we also get the further complexities of two sides arguing the morals of abortion from these two perspectives and thus mixing up the topics. One side arguing against abortion from a all life matters perspective while another is arguing for abortion from an area of responsibility perspective. Not only does that require a stance within the individual areas, but also a stance of which moral area takes precedence.

So these are two different ways of seeing the moral differences, there are others like importance placed on quality of life and the obligations of society to care for the children if abortion is allowed/not allowed.

The question itself was not very interesting to me as I found it exceedingly biased, but I found that the answers did not sufficiently enough challenge the fundamentals which is why I tried to add a pinch of my thoughts (though this format does not lend itself well to deep philosophical reasoning from what I see here). What I did find to be an intriguing aspect of this massive question is the fact that to me, the presence of abortion means that you can put higher demands on the care of the toddler. Infanticide is not really something I consider to be a serious issue, but if it was, then it would be more immoral because of the option of abortion. Now there is a moral difference to consider.