Infanticide and madness

[...]at the risk of giving offense, I will say it again: advocating the moral permissibility of killing healthy newborn infants is moral madness; and it is scandalous, especially in a journal (the Journal of Medical Ethics) expressly directed not merely to philosophers (who-and I confess to being one-enjoy playing with every manner of shocking idea) but to physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals-people whose attitudes shape decisions they make about the lives of real people, including real infants. With regard to questions falling into the latter category, attention to those truth-obscuring conditions helps us to understand how it can be that large numbers of reasonable people are able to accept even a terrible moral wrong, such as the wrong of treating human beings as chattel property. Patrick Lee and I do that here: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_ chapter/1405115475/Cohen_sample%20chapter_Contemporary%20debates%20in%20applied%20ethics.pdf Second, Giubilini and Minerva, as well as the editors of the Journal of Medical Ethics, report receiving a barrage of hate mail, and even death threats, from people identifying themselves as pro-lifers and even Christians.