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JoshuaFox comments on Why abortion looks more okay to us than killing babies - Less Wrong
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If you want to talk about "ancestral environment," then note that infanticide is quite common in many cultures, as far as I can tell including hunter-gatherers.
I'm working in a neonatal unit at the moment, and one of the doctors mentioned that both doctors' and parents' willingness to "pull the plug" on a baby whose chances don't seem too good is vastly higher than their willingness to pull the plug on a twelve-year-old with the same chances would be.
That's a good point -- so it's not all about survival rate.
Maybe it's about how easy it is to imagine that the child (or fetus) never existed? It's pretty damn obvious that a twelve-year-old existed. A baby, less so, and a fetus, hardly at all.
That last doesn't seem to be reliably true. There are people who grieve for a long time over miscarriages (children who didn't get born?).
People's imaginations vary a lot.
Yvain's point doesn't prove that conclusion*. A baby who has a low chance of surviving the year is going to have some parents going "If zhe does survive, what then? I mean, will zhe ever recover, what if it recurs? I can't keep going through this, especially if it's just gonna end up with me grieving in 5 years time!"
*(I still tend to agree with the conclusion, because of things like your second paragraph, but Yvain's point is actually somewhat irrelevant to the conclusion)
They've experienced <1 year of the baby, and there's been at least 1 near-fatal occurence; that's a high, and worrying, frequency. The image that gives is that, by age 12, the child will have been through several (>4) such events. Too many.
A 12-year-olds parents have had 12 years, and ONE nigh-fatal incident. The child is >50% of the way to reproductive age. That's a very different situation.
I suspect this plays a large part, combined with the sunk cost fallacy.
I don't think that the sunk cost consideration is a fallacy in this case.
variation in SIDS across socio-economic spectrum suggest infanticide is quite common in our culture.