Francesca Minerva is an associate professor of philosophy working at the University of Milan. She’s probably best known for co-writing the paper ‘After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’ with Alberto Giubilini in 2012. The paper, as the title suggests, argues that the same logic which makes abortion morally and legally permissible should also extend to early infanticide. The paper isn’t a satire or a deliberate reductio ad absurdum: Minerva and Giubilini really are arguing for infanticide.

Now, this paper tends to show up in pro-life discourse in something like the following way. “Abortion supporters are getting so extreme,” someone will say, “that they’re even arguing for after-birth abortion.” The publication of the paper is supposed to be a sign of a rapidly shifting Overton Window, a public square in which the most maximalist of pro-choice positions are fair game but supporting any restrictions on abortion at all gets you cancelled.

It’s instructive, then, to look at the actual reaction that Minerva faced after the publication of her paper. The Centre for Academic Freedom interviewed her about her experience, and they write:

Following publication, the paper was widely shared on a number of pro-life blogs in the United States and Minerva, as the corresponding author, was inundated with death threats, from both pro-life and pro-choice individuals. […] 

Minerva’s paper has got her into trouble among fellow academics too. At the time of publication, she was employed as a researcher on a temporary contract and was looking for a permanent position. Following an application to one university department, the chair of the department’s job committee wrote to her stating that they would like to offer her the job but could not as ‘some colleagues were strongly opposed to the views expressed in the paper’. 

On another occasion, Minerva discovered an anonymous post on the blog ‘beingawomaninphilosophy’ describing the case of three women shortlisted for an academic position in the US. The author, who claims to have served on the hiring committee, states that one of these three women had previously written a controversial article on abortion – and for this reason explicitly was not given the job. Minerva thinks it likely that she is the woman referred to, since she was applying to jobs at US universities at the time and knows of no other papers on abortion which attracted a similar degree of controversy. She believes that this constitutes a second instance in which she suffered what is in effect a reprisal against her for her views in the paper. 

Minerva eventually did get a teaching job. But it took her eleven years after finishing her doctorate to do so. (As a PhD candidate in philosophy myself, this number fills me with both sympathy and dread.) Now, anyone who knows anything about analytic philosophy departments knows they’re not exactly pro-life bastions. Minerva was not being frozen out by pro-lifers, but by middle-of-the-road pro-choicers.

Now, I suspect sexism played a role in Minerva’s struggles. Michael Tooley, an Australian philosopher who is emeritus professor at the University of Boulder, Colorado, wrote a piece in 1972 called ‘A defence of abortion and infanticide’, which made the same basic point as Minerva from a different angle. Tooley is a widely respected philosopher who is regularly published, and his original paper is still routinely assigned to undergraduates. Alberto Giubilini also didn’t struggle as much.

But I also suspect that Minerva was punished just because lots of ordinary pro-choice people in academia thought her position was profoundly morally wrong. Most pro-choice people are not in favour of infanticide, and, like anyone else, tend to find support for it horrifying and offensive. Minerva’s opinions were too extreme for the pro-choice establishment. That wasn’t just true in academia: the mainstream media reaction to her and Giubliani’s piece ranged from revulsion to bemusement. There was, I think, a third reason why Minerva faced so much difficulty, but I’ll come to that.

This then is a concrete example of the pro-choice world not running to embrace the most pro-choice possible positions. While Minerva was looking for a job she (along with very pro-choice philosophers Jeff McMahan and Peter Singer) founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas, an academic journal which publishes articles anonymously. Again, not a sign that views like hers are being embraced by the mainstream!

Now, ‘After-birth abortion’ might be the most extreme of extreme views, but there are plenty of cases of pro-choice people rejecting even more ordinary strongly pro-choice policies. Most of Europe, for example (Ireland included) restricts late abortion quite significantly while leaving early abortions (the vast majority) unregulated (I discussed this back in 2022). Abortion on request is a reality throughout pregnancy in some US states and Canada, but it’s far from the most common abortion policy worldwide. The most extreme pro-choice positions are as often rejected as they are accepted.


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So what’s the upshot of all this? There are several. A running theme of my posts on this blog is that I think pro-lifers should be less afraid and more optimistic. There is a lot more openness to the pro-life case out there than the average pro-lifer tends to think, and one of the main things blocking further progress for the movement is a certain kind of pro-life fear. One thing that can drive this fear is the idea that the pro-choice movement always carries all before it, that there is some inexorable law of the universe (or at least the modern world) favouring abortion choice. Seeing how tough a time radical pro-choicers can have should complicate that picture a bit.

But another – and perhaps more controversial – lesson to draw from Minerva’s experience is that I think extreme pro-choice positions and their proponents are not the primary enemy of the pro-life movement, and that they can in fact often be helpful. The pro-choice case finds most success when it can trade on vagueness. The more support for abortion can be framed as healthcare, as respect for privacy, as about a woman’s right to choose, as best practice in most western countries, as regulating something that’s going to happen anyway – in other words, as something general and vague – the more reasonable it feels to support it. The more the actual arguments for the pro-choice position are made clear and explicit, the worse they sound. The best arguments that the unborn are not our equals also lead to the conclusion that people with severe cognitive disabilities and born infants aren’t either. The best bodily rights arguments end up arguing for a right to kill innocent children in the name of bodily integrity. None of these are implications that most people like facing head on. 

People like Francesca Minerva, Alberto Giubilini, and Jeff McMahan are smart, honest, and courageous enough to own the implications of their pro-choice views. I think the conclusions they come to are of course profoundly wrong. But I think the same of the more ordinary, moderate pro-choice conclusions that are far, far more common.

This leads me to the third reason I think Minerva had trouble getting a job. I bet some of the pro-choice academics who blocked her thought she was letting the side down. Having a young female professor articulately and persuasively arguing from pro-choice premises to infanticidal conclusions would, they thought, ultimately do the pro-choice case more harm than good.

When it comes to Minerva, and to other people espousing extreme pro-choice views, I think they were right.

Ben