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[clockworksaint]

This story was all over the front page of the Metro recently: 'Wicked' mother gets life for smothering newborn in clingfilm. I think the Metro story focused even more on the "witchcraft" element, which seems both irrelevant and speculative, but I'm not going to talk about that. In fact, I don't really want to talk about this specific case, since

Comments

[hubcap_reloaded]

It's really difficult to pick out the specifics in cases like this: to try and draw the magic line where X crime becomes worse than Y crime. Emotions become all we have to go on, but that's not very helpful to legal systems. (Observe arguments over whether murder or rape is a worse crime - how much of that is in the head and how much is in the heart)

I find this section of your post interesting:

It's clear that family members suffer when one of their own dies, especially so if it was someone providing support or someone in whom much hope had been invested, and possibly less so when it was someone who was already frail and suffering and the death might be seen as a relief. The specific case of a mother killing her own newborn raises the question of who suffers. Certainly there might be a father or others close by with an emotional investment in the child who would suffer, but the question seems most interesting when there is not. I'm reading this as implying that there is a logical case for saying an infant dying matters less

[clockworksaint]

I hope I don't sound too sociopathic here, but you're right that I'm trying to avoid emotional arguments.

I can also think of some science fiction that had societies with quite different attitudes to the personhood of children. I believe I read one short story with a rather disturbing society that "aborted" children up to the age of 10. I don't even think it was intended as a criticism of abortion by way of comparison to infanticide. Then there's the like of Iain M. Bank's The Algebraist, which has an advanced alien society that spawns like fish with hundreds of young, leaving them to fend for themselves and treating them like animals until some point when they mature into adult citizens

[hubcap_reloaded]

I believe I read one short story with a rather disturbing society that "aborted" children up to the age of 10. I don't even think it was intended as a criticism of abortion by way of comparison to infanticide.

Ailsa recently read this, I think: it was a Philip K Dick story in the collection We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. She found it a little hard going, though from her description it did indeed sound like it wasn't directly about abortion so much as the usual Philip K Dick question of "what makes a person".

You could make a comparison to how we treat animals - in western European society they have legal protection and mistreating them is an offence, but they also aren't people and they definitely come in below humans on the priorities list. Just because they aren't adult humans doesn't mean killing them is OK, but we do develop seperate rules for them.

I did think of another argument in favour of killing unwanted, born babies, and that's the desirability of simple and easy to interpret rules. I suppose you might call

[clockworksaint]

That third paragraph has an obvious mistake. The argument is in favour of the illegality of killing unwanted, born babies. Hopefully that was clear.

[jobob_80]

I thought I would comment on this precisely because I find it very hard to deal with logically