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"Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness" - and therefore “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person . . .

Singer has just blown the PETA argument for “animal rights” out of the water. Singer would, of course, disagree. He would claim that animals have rights not permitted unborn children.

So very true, dear YHAOS! Indeed, Singer might (and ALFs probably would) consider an amoeba to be autonomous, rational and self-conscious. Animal liberation activists have a very low bar for such things.

In Animal Liberation, Singer argues against what he calls speciesism: discrimination on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. He holds the interests of all beings capable of suffering to be worthy of equal consideration, and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. He argues that animals should have rights based on their ability to feel pain more than their intelligence. In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average human, many severely intellectually challenged humans show equally diminished, if not lower, mental capacity, and that some animals have displayed signs of intelligence (for example, primates learning elements of American sign language and other symbolic languages) sometimes on par with that of human children, and that therefore intelligence does not provide a basis for providing nonhuman animals any less consideration than such intellectually challenged humans.

... killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person.

Which begs the question of WHEN a human being becomes a "person."

It takes up to two years after birth for the brain — ~200 cm³ at birth — to reach its full size — ~1200 – 1300 cm³ — and get fully "wired up." Is the child a non-person during this period?

Or should we use some other criterion for "personhood," such as language ability?

The human child is essentially helpless without parental care until about age 12. During this period, since the child cannot take care of himself, can we regard him as a "person" yet? I.e., before he is independent, autonomous?

Depending on what criterion one chooses to apply, one can have open season on children for lack of "personhood" for up to twelve years after birth....

This is the sort of thing that results from Singer's twisted logic. There is obviously something profoundly wrong about it.

The only way to avoid this slippery slope is simply to accept that a human child in utero is a person from day one; i.e., from the moment of conception.

I believe this is God's intention. Which is probably why Singer is generating all kinds of mindless alternative proposals.... He would "be god" himself, and brooks no competition to his own singular preeminence, either from God or man.

To say he holds human beings in general contempt would probably be an understatement. Yet it is clear that he has no lack of high regard for himself.

Why would any sane person listen to him? He is a most strangely disordered man.

JMHO, FWIW

Thanks so much for writing, dear YHAOS!