It's OK to kill babies? And that's fit to print?

"It was," said my brother-in-law, "the single most disturbing piece I've read in a newspaper in a long, long time."

My brother-in-law is given to hyperbole on occasion, but not this time. The piece in question appeared in the Nov. 2 edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Therein, one Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, basically argued that the indefensible-baby-killing-was not indefensible.

Pinker is the author of "How the Mind Works," a newly published and supposedly seminal work on the theory of evolutionary psychology. He is a man of stature in his academic field and enjoys the respect and admiration of his colleagues. His piece ran in the most prestigious newspaper in the world. His views on infanticide, apparently, are no longer considered outside the mainstream.

We're a long way down a wrong road. The reaction to Pinker's rationalization of infanticide was a deafening silence. Only Michael Kelly, former editor of The New Republic and now a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, raised his voice in protest. A Lexus/Nexus search of commentary in the days and weeks following publication of Pinker's piece revealed "no matches," because no one, apparently, deemed it worthy of discussion. Kelly bluntly summarized Pinker's view of infanticide in his Washington Post column of Nov. 6: "Mothers who kill their newborn infants should not be judged as harshly as people who take human life in its later stages because newborn infants are not persons in the full sense of the word, and therefore do not enjoy a right to life." As Kelly rightly points out, Pinker breaks new ground here, arguing that life does not necessarily begin at birth.

This is a very radical argument. Just how radical becomes more clear the deeper one delves into Pinker's essay. "To a biologist," Pinker writes, "birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. . . The right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that define us as individuals and connect us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death, and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: Our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do." Pinker goes on to point out that "several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder." As Kelly rightly points out in his withering critique, Pinker basically concurs with these "moral" philosophers. Says Pinker: "The facts don't make it easy" to legitimately outlaw the killing of infants.

This is incredible stuff. To argue that "the facts don't make it easy" to outlaw legitimately the killing of infants is profoundly troubling on almost every level. And yet, there it was, in the paper of record for your Sunday morning reading pleasure.

More incredible was the deafening silence that followed the column. Imagine for a moment that a distinguished MIT professor had written a piece in the The New York Times Sunday Magazine arguing that doctors who perform partial-birth abortions should be arrested on charges of second-degree murder. A majority of Americans believe partial-birth abortion is morally proximate to murder, and not without reason.

Such an article, in the unlikely event of its publication, would have caused an uproar. The editors of the magazine would have been inundated with faxes, letters, e-mails, and phone calls. Subscriptions would have been canceled in protest. Newspaper columns would have been written expressing outrage and consternation. Liberal commentators would have scolded the Times for even allowing such "right-wing hate-mongering" to be included in its pages. West 43rd Street (home of the Times) would have been under siege.

But publish an article that basically advocates the decriminalization of infanticide, and the media world yawns before moving blithely on to the next thing. The right-to-life movement has long argued that once society adapts to the idea of aborting fetuses, it would soon entertain the idea of killing infants.

This argument used to be thought specious, a non sequitur, doom-saying of the overworked imagination. Judging from Pinker's article and the subsequent media reaction, it must now be regarded as true.

John Ellis is a consultant at Rasky & Company in Boston. This column appeared in the Boston Globe (November 29, 1997) and is reprinted here with the author's permission.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Winter 1998
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