Abortion and Peter Singer

Peter Singer and Abortion

To listen to this in mp3 format click here

In his now infamous book, Practical Ethics, Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton University made the shocking claim that it may sometimes be morally justified, not only to perform an abortion, but even to kill a newborn child.

Now of course, Prof. Singer couldn’t be more wrong, and yet his radical position does reveal something very important about the entire abortion debate. You see, Singer realizes something that other less-radical defenders of abortion miss completely. If it is morally permissible to destroy a human fetus, why would it be wrong to kill that same fetus once it is born (and thus, not longer technically a fetus)? To be sure, there is very little difference between an 8 month old fetus and a newborn baby.

What Singer does is to draw the pro-abortion argument out to its own repugnant logical conclusion. If abortion is justified, so is infanticide. There’s just no getting around it.