ABSTRACT
One way to defend abortion is to defend infanticide, the intentional killing of a baby after birth. If it can be shown that personhood begins sometime after birth, it will be all the more evident that personhood does not begin prior to birth, and so abortion is not morally wrong. One of the fi rst and most widely disseminated defenses of this view was offered by Michael Tooley’s article “Abortion and Infanticide” in which he argues for the moral permissibility of abortion throughout pregnancy and infanticide, up to a week after the child is born. At least among modern philosophers, Tooley broke new ground, but others eventually followed him, lengthening the time for justifi able infanticide to a month after birth (Singer 2000, p. 163) or longer. Singer writes,
If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.
