I’ve worked with parents of very disabled children, and it’s not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.
Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.
I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.
Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a “meltdown”, be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you’d have to vent her stomach.
Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn’t quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to work for them during that time.
Her existence had a terrible effect on her family. They had to hire around the clock care. As in, amazingly patient care-givers that were hard to find, to cover about 100 hours a week. I would get stressed covering 2 shifts a week, and I don’t know how her parents were managing to cope.
This child was a drain on society and on everyone around her. Because of her parents’ religious values, they wouldn’t kill her even if it were legal. But their lives would have been dramatically improved if it were otherwise.
Also, I agree that infants have less or equal personhood than many animals. The way I handle the discrepancy is by being a vegetarian. But since most people aren’t vegetarians, they don’t really have a strong supporting reason to be against legalized infanticide.
So, my position is that the necessary standard to justify ending a 10 month old’s life is only a bit lower than that of ending a 18 year old’s life, and is only a bit higher than the necessary standard to justify ending a fetus’s life. I’m patient. But what that statement often obscures is that I’m willing to let people meet that standard. I would support ending the individual you described at ages of 6 years, 60 years, 6 months, or 6 months after conception.
But the acknowledgement that not every life should be continued is very different from a “return policy” sort of infanticide which Bakkot is justifying by saying “well, they’re not people yet.” Sometimes it’s best to kill people, too, and so personhood isn’t the true issue.
I’ve worked with parents of very disabled children, and it’s not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.
Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.
I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.
Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a “meltdown”, be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you’d have to vent her stomach.
Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn’t quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to work for them during that time.
Her existence had a terrible effect on her family. They had to hire around the clock care. As in, amazingly patient care-givers that were hard to find, to cover about 100 hours a week. I would get stressed covering 2 shifts a week, and I don’t know how her parents were managing to cope.
This child was a drain on society and on everyone around her. Because of her parents’ religious values, they wouldn’t kill her even if it were legal. But their lives would have been dramatically improved if it were otherwise.
Also, I agree that infants have less or equal personhood than many animals. The way I handle the discrepancy is by being a vegetarian. But since most people aren’t vegetarians, they don’t really have a strong supporting reason to be against legalized infanticide.
So, my position is that the necessary standard to justify ending a 10 month old’s life is only a bit lower than that of ending a 18 year old’s life, and is only a bit higher than the necessary standard to justify ending a fetus’s life. I’m patient. But what that statement often obscures is that I’m willing to let people meet that standard. I would support ending the individual you described at ages of 6 years, 60 years, 6 months, or 6 months after conception.
But the acknowledgement that not every life should be continued is very different from a “return policy” sort of infanticide which Bakkot is justifying by saying “well, they’re not people yet.” Sometimes it’s best to kill people, too, and so personhood isn’t the true issue.