A little over a decade ago, two academics published a short piece in a major medical-ethics journal and set off a firestorm. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argued, in effect, that abortion is only half of the coin. The very same reasons commonly used to justify killing a fetus, they claimed, work just as well to justify killing a newborn. In other words, they were defending infanticide—or, as they preferred to call it, “after-birth abortion.”
The piece sent shockwaves through the philosophical community. Academics who themselves support abortion were horrified. Yet in a strange way, none of it should have been news. Peter Singer and Michael Tooley had been advancing the same basic logic for decades. What made Giubilini and Minerva different was not the novelty of their argument but its reach. Their article caught the eye of the press, and for the first time the general public—not just professional ethicists—heard someone say plainly: if we can kill fetuses, why can’t we kill newborns? Neither, they insisted, is an actual person.
To answer arguments like these, we have to begin further back than the arguments themselves. We have to begin with worldview.
Why Worldview Comes First
A worldview is like a pair of glasses. It is the cluster of foundational beliefs through which a person makes sense of reality. Two people can look at the same newborn and see entirely different things, because they are looking through different lenses. If we want to understand how a thoughtful academic could conclude that a healthy newborn may be killed, we have to understand the lenses being worn.
Consider philosophical naturalism, one of the dominant worldviews of our moment. On this view, the universe came from nothing and was caused by nothing. Everything that exists is the product of undirected chance. Human beings, like everything else, are accidental arrangements of physical matter, and therefore have no intrinsic purposes to fulfill. Knowledge, on this account, is strictly physical: if a thing cannot be measured, tested, and observed, it is not real.
Notice what this does to ethics. If human beings are cosmic accidents with no built-in purposes, then there are no obligations that flow from those purposes, because there are none. Objective right and wrong require an objective standard—a moral lawgiver in whom moral rules are grounded. Naturalism cannot supply that. So morality gets reduced to whatever we happen to contract into, or whatever we have consented to. There is no soul, no immaterial essence, nothing that makes a human being the kind of thing that ought to be treated a certain way. We are simply matter, and when we die, that is the end. No judgment, no accounting, no standard we failed or fulfilled. We cease to exist, like everything else.
Now layer on a second worldview: postmodernism. The postmodern claim is that even if objective truth exists, we could never reach it, because we are trapped behind our own perceptions and cultural biases. Knowledge, on this view, is simply what we talk about; we construct reality through language. And if that is so, then human nature is not something we discover—it is something we build. The Supreme Court captured this perfectly in the 1992 Casey decision, whose famous “mystery passage” declared that every individual has the right to define for themselves the meaning of the universe, of human life, and of our place in it.
The trouble is immediate. If human nature is merely constructed and not real, then the natural rights that spring from human nature—the right to life, the right to liberty, the rights the Declaration of Independence treats as preceding government—are not real either. There is nothing objective there to affirm.
This is why the outrage at Giubilini and Minerva, while understandable, often misses the deeper point. Someone who believes human nature is real and knowable would look at the fetus and the newborn, agree that there is no essential difference between them, and draw the pro-life conclusion: both are valuable by nature, so we ought to protect both. But on a naturalistic or postmodern worldview, where value is either accidental or invented, why not draw the opposite conclusion? Why not say neither has intrinsic worth, and both may be killed?
The Argument for After-Birth Abortion
With the worldview foundation in view, the structure of Giubilini and Minerva’s case becomes clear. Following Singer and Tooley, they argue roughly as follows. Neither the fetus nor the newborn is an actual person; each is only a potential one. Only actual persons have a right to life. To be an actual person, a being must be able to value its own existence. Fetuses and newborns cannot do this, so they remain merely potential persons. And since the interests of actual persons always outweigh those of potential ones, both abortion and infanticide are morally permissible, because neither involves killing an actual person.
Everything hinges on their definition of personhood. Being a member of the human species is not enough; possessing human DNA does not, on their view, secure a right to life. Instead, a person must be capable of three things, and capable of exercising them immediately: valuing one’s own existence, having a desire not to be harmed, and being able to experience harm. It is not sufficient to be the kind of being that will one day do these things. One must be able to do them now.
Underlying this is what philosophers call the mental continuity view. On this account, there is no “you” present until there is a stream of memory and experience—a biographical identity, not merely a biological one. The mere presence of a living human organism does not mean a person is present. The real “you,” they say, is your connected chain of thoughts, memories, and desires to go on living. Giubilini and Minerva embraced this so fully that when asked whether it would have been wrong to kill them before they developed these traits, they answered that no wrong would have occurred—because there was no “them” there yet.
Why the Argument Fails
The argument is clever, but it does not survive scrutiny.
Start with the claim that one must experience harm in order to be harmed. This is simply false to our ordinary moral intuitions. Suppose I am cheated out of an inheritance I am rightly owed, but I never learn of it. I experience no distress, yet I have plainly been wronged. Suppose someone slits my throat while I am under anesthesia, or shoots me from behind so that I die instantly, never feeling a thing. No suffering is experienced, yet a grave wrong has been done. If harm required the experience of harm, none of these would count as wrongs. They obviously are.
Consider next the claim that one must value one’s existence to be a person. Imagine a man who is deeply depressed and suicidal, who places no value on his life and wants only to die. Has he ceased to be himself? Has he lost his identity, his personhood? Of course not. He is as much a person as anyone, precisely the sort of person we should want to protect. Valuing one’s existence is not what makes one a self.
Worse for the argument, it proves far too much. This was pointed out not by a pro-lifer but by Bertha Alvarez, a philosopher who defends abortion yet objected to Giubilini and Minerva. Drawing on developmental psychology, she noted that two-year-olds—perhaps even three-year-olds—do not yet value their existence over time, lack a firm sense of themselves as continuing individuals, and may not clearly grasp that they exist separately from their parents. If personhood requires these capacities, then the argument reaches well past newborns and into toddlers and older children. It would follow that a healthy two-and-a-half-year-old who showed no apparent valuing of his own existence could be killed—and, on the logic that only actual persons hold a right to life, that his body could be used for organ farming or live medical experiments to benefit actual persons. The authors would seem not merely to permit this but to require it. That conclusion is monstrous, and it tells us the premises are false.
Boonin’s Different Road
Not every defender of abortion travels the mental-continuity route. In his 2002 book A Defense of Abortion, David Boonin takes a strikingly different path—and it is worth understanding, because it concedes what pro-lifers have long argued.
Boonin opens by placing two photographs side by side: an ultrasound image of his son Eli in the womb, and a photograph of Eli after birth. It is the same little boy, he admits. There is no difference in identity between them. You are indeed identical to the embryo you once were; that was not a blob of tissue but you. And then comes the thesis: even so, Boonin argues, it would have been morally permissible to have killed Eli at that earlier stage.
How can both be true? Boonin distinguishes identity from the right to life. You are the same being you were as an embryo, he says, but you did not then possess the same right to life you have now. We already assign some rights by developmental stage—a two-year-old has no right to vote or drive—so why not the right to life as well? What grounds that right, for Boonin, is having immediately exercisable desires, which he ties to organized cortical brain activity beginning around week twenty-eight. Before that, the human being exists and is identical to his later self, but lacks the right to life.
Here too the argument falters. We can question whether desires are an adequate foundation for the right to life at all. A slave can be conditioned not to desire his freedom, yet he remains entitled to it in virtue of the kind of being he is. Children may not desire good nutrition or education, but they are owed them all the same. Imagine a man who damages the very part of his brain responsible for desire in an accident—does he forfeit his right to life because he no longer desires anything? Borrowing an example from Frank Beckwith, imagine a physician who surgically alters a developing fetus so that it never forms desires; if that child is killed at age five for his organs, are we to say no wrong was done because he desired nothing? Or consider a person who, through discipline, reaches a state of desiring nothing at all. Has he stopped being a person with a right to life? Surely not.
The Common Thread
Giubilini, Minerva, and Boonin arrive at their conclusions by different roads—one grounded in identity, the other in rights—but the conclusions converge, and both are deadly. What unites them is the attempt to make human value contingent on traits that none of us share equally and that come and go across a lifetime: the capacity to value one’s existence, to hold desires, to experience harm. Tie human worth to accidental capacities, and human worth becomes negotiable.
The pro-life answer is not to deny that the fetus and the newborn are alike. It is to insist that they are alike in the way that matters most: both are living human beings, and human beings are valuable by nature, not by function. That is a claim these arguments cannot defeat—but it is one we must be equipped to defend.