A murder trial is all the rage in France: A French woman repeatedly killed her newborn babies. From the story:
Véronique Courjault, by her own admission, smothered the two babies after giving birth to them secretly in Seoul, the first in 2002 and the second in 2003. She also has acknowledged killing a newborn and burning the body in her garden after a first secret pregnancy in 1999, before the couple left France.
Jean-Louis Courjault, French prosecutors ruled, was never aware of his wife’s pregnancies, or her lonely deliveries in the family bathtub and the subsequent slayings of three infants. After a long investigation, he was not charged, leaving unanswered how he could have failed to notice his wife’s condition. He has attended her trial with the goal, he told reporters, of offering all the support he can.
Peter Singer and other personhood theorists claim that infanticide–assuming it is painless–isn’t immoral or wrong because the child, not being self aware over time or unable to yet value his or her own life, is not a “person.” If that is so, they can be treated as mere objects that can be killed if that suits the interests of the family. Thus, it seems to me, that Peter Singer should testify for the defense, since, in his view, killing a baby is no more wrong than killing a fish. Yes, he has explicitly written that:
Since neither a newborn infant nor a fish is a person, the wrongness of killing such beings is not as wrong as killing a person.
(Cite: Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, p. 220.)
No, Peter Singer isn’t responsible for these murders. But these murders illustratethe immorality of Peter Singer’s “moral philosophy.”
June 16th, 2009 | 2:23 pm
My take on personhood is an electrically active brain. It does not matter if the person is unconscious, in a coma, is diseased or disabled, etc. all that matters is if activity can be detected. This is the criteria used to determine “brain death” which even the Vatican recognizes as the end of personhood even if the body is kept alive on machines. Thus it stands to reason that embryos, while being living human bodies, that lack an electrically active brain are not yet people (which occurs sometime in the 7th or 8th week of pregnancy).
June 16th, 2009 | 2:29 pm
Had this happened in Texas, she’d be out in 6 months.
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Texas-Could-Be-First-State-to-Have-Infanticide-Law.html
June 16th, 2009 | 3:46 pm
R. Hampton: That’s not Singer’s take, nor is it the mainstream view in bioethics. The embryo has brain activity, and indeed, can respond reflexively before the 8th week of gestation. Hence, under your view, by the eighth week at the latest, an embryo is a full person.
Singer doesn’t believe a baby is a person until approximately the first year. Some bioethicists take it even farther out.
Thanks for coming by and contributing to SHS.
June 16th, 2009 | 7:22 pm
I was just on RHreality check where an anonymous person wrote, “I’m pro infanticide. Why should anyone have to raise a child that has down syndrome or is autistic?” Lovely, just lovely.
June 16th, 2009 | 8:33 pm
So basically, while a child is helpless, the kid isn’t worth anything that the parents say it isn’t worth. Which is a lovely thought.
There was a similar case here in the USA, and darn it, I sold back the book to Halfprice, so I haven’t got the information to give details (dang!). In that case, the mother killed her babies, then hid the bodies in cardboard boxes and dumped those boxes into a long-term storage facility. They might never have been found if the lady hadn’t stopped making payments on the storage unit. Her boxes were auctioned off in a lot, and the bodies were found there.
In that case, she was prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison for the death of three of her children.
It’s ironic that so many people were so angry about those murders, especially the prosecution, and yet there are so many people who talk about doing everything to protect the culture of some indigenous people, never minding the fact that a lot of those cultures permit or encourage killing infants after birth, to keep competition down between sibs or to limit the numbers of children born. Particularly if the children are girls.
June 16th, 2009 | 9:55 pm
R. Hampton, you’re welcome to your opinion but please do not misrepresent the position of the Catholic church. Rather, read directly from the Catechism:
2274 Since it must be treated from conception as a person, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being.
June 17th, 2009 | 2:55 pm
RHampton: you should also know that there is a group of scientists within the Catholic church posit that the Vatican’s position on brain death is out of step with current practical experience in the medical sciences. There has been over the past decade a strong initiative, which has been steadily increasing in strength, to review brain death, which may lead to the Catholic church revising it’s position against current brain death practices and indeed even the way organ donation is currently done.
June 17th, 2009 | 8:21 pm
The whole “personhood” thing is like a very bad joke. Why do we even have a word that means the same thing as “human being” (in every sense except the perverted legal one)?
What is the point in having another word that means exactly the same thing as the common term for our species?
The only thing I can think of is that it’s shorter than “human being”, and we are lazy with out language. We could say “human”, but somehow over the ages the use of the word person came into vogue, and we are stuck with it.
However, having multiple words meaning the same thing has certain advantages for those who wish to establish more than one “level” of humanity, such as “sub-human”. That way they can claim that a particular group are not “people” (like blacks, Jews, etc.).
And that is the way it has worked out, in fact. Even our own Supreme Court got in the act by declaring that the founding fathers did not have the unborn in mind when they wrote the word “person” in the Constitution.
It is the very height of hatred that inspires certain people to label others “non-persons”. And the final irony is, even that label is defined as ” a person regarded as non-existent or insignificant. http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/nonperson?view=uk
June 17th, 2009 | 10:45 pm
Actually, ‘person’ arose out of the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the early Church, so while it encompasses human beings, it is not limited to them.
June 18th, 2009 | 4:38 pm
College Goyl, angel,
You should know that Lucetta Scaraffia, a professor of contemporary history and frequent contributor to the Vatican newspaper “L’Osservatore Romano”, said in an article last September that;
“the acceptance of the cessation of brain activity as death would seem to equate the human person with brain function, contradicting Catholic teaching about the dignity of every human life from the moment of conception.”
The Vatican issued a statement later saying the article reflected only the views of author, but the logic stands. The belief that a soul enters the embryo at conception is just that – a belief. Yet the Vatican also believes the soul and the brain are joined, so that the one determines the fate of the other.
I agree, and taken to its logical conclusion, the soul enters the embyro when there is a brain to inhabit.
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