"Choosing infanticide over abandonment is pretty pointless, so why do it?" "Killing another living thing doesn't qualify as "euthanasia" if you do it for your benefit, not that being's."

• Let me respond by a little story telling, without making a clear point. I am not proving You wrong, just sharing my personal experience. Warnings: depressive stories about ilnesses, probably bad reading.

I once was a friend with a boy with a progressive muscular dystrophy. It is a degenerative disease, where gradually, Your muscles stop working, and at the age of cca 20, most patients die, because they stop breathing. If You have heard great stories about people on the wheelchair getting adapted to their situation, well, here adaptation can be only shorterm, because next year, You might not be able of doing what you can do now. The pain was not excruciating but there was some, the body which is deprived of excercise gives You this feedback. If he had a bad dream at night, he could not turn to the other side (a very usual remedy, most people do it without even realizing). The boy had 2 suicide attempts, although, frankly, he did not really mean them. He would make phonecalls to his friends in the evening to relieve his pain - very unwelcome calls. I sometimes pretended not to be at home, and I know other people who did the same (We were in our twenties). Then, his desperation was deepened by feeling he is not loved. Once he was calling his psychologist, and caught her in the middle of a suicide attempt, poisoned by drugs - she repeated to him HIS previous statements from the previous phonecalls. I am not saying it was HIS fault, the lady clearly failed to safeguard the known risks of her profession (plus had other problems, departed partner etc.) I am just illustrating how hard it was sometimes to deal with him. (He called other people who saved her life, to close up this branch of the story). His parents took great care of him up to the level of their financial abilities, plus using the limited help of our government. There were frequent conflicts between him and his parents, though, and made him feel unloved, again. On the other hand, his parents were deeply religious and, knowingly, had another baby with the same genetic defect later, they did not choose abortion. The older boy has died at the age of 28, his life being surprisingly long.

This story clearly contains aspects, which were not optimized, the parents could have earned more money and bring more comforts to his lives, he could have gotten a personal assistant at night, more physiotherapy excercises, a better computer, some lectures how to deal with people and get a girlfriend (his desires were strong), he could have tried harder to develop his talents and get a job, which would make him feel useful to society. (We persuaded him to get a job eventually, phone operator, lasted 1 year or so). His friens, including me, could have worked harder on their emotional maturity. But, can You see all the energy and resources to make a misery somewhat better ?

Now let us see a different story, where the parents of a sick child became EXTREME optimizers. Watch the film Lorenzo's Oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo%27s_Oil_%28film%29) or read about Lorenzo Odone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Odone). Wonderful and admirable story. But can You see the end result, after You do all that is in Your power for Your baby ?

"Choosing infanticide over abandonment is pretty pointless, so why do it?" Abandoning a baby with a severe genetic defect at birth condemnes the baby to even lower quality of life in most government institutions, unless a millionaire chooses to adopt him.

I have a counterargument to my own reasoning right away - what if some parents killed their baby diagnosed with adrenoleukodystrophy (but with no developed symptomps yet) a year before Augusto and Michaela Odone invented the Lorenzo's Oil for their son ? Such parents would have lost a potentially healthy baby, the baby would lose a realistic chance to live their normal life...

I am not really trying to win this argument, just explaining, why I sometimes TOY with the idea of infanticide being not so immoral, and considering it a form of euthanasia.