Their answer, of course, is that the baby should not live—-he or she should be killed if his or her parents desire it because they feel his or her existence is a burden to them and will harm their well-being or the well-being of the family. It doesn’t matter to the authors whether the baby is physically and psychologically healthy. As a mere “potential person” (sound familiar?), the infant has no right not to be killed at his or her parents will. Of course, most parents of healthy newborns won’t be interested in killing them (though they should have the right to). But parents who find themselves with a newborn afflicted with, say, Downs Syndrome, might find the child to “be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole.” What if others are willing to adopt the baby so that he or she won’t be killed? Well, the parents might decide to give the child up, and that is certainly their right; but they may prefer to kill him or her, since they may find it psychologically difficult to have a child of theirs out there in the world somewhere.
[…]
Surely if respected philosophers were arguing for a right to kill members of a racial or ethnic minority group, as opposed to infant children, there would be denunciations from left and right alike. But the left’s having tied itself to the abortion license creates an obvious problem. Giubilini and Minerva, like Singer and Tooley before them, and like more than a few others in between, alas, really are simply following out the logic of their commitment to “abortion rights.” Or so it seems to them, and to me.