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Steven Pinker’s Evolutionary "Explanation" of Infanticide

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Pinker then (implausibly) depicts new mothers as initially detached and unencumbered by emotional ties to their children, while they decide whether or not to let them live: "A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual."
If Pinker is right, we might add that the laws of biology (not to mention the teen parents themselves) were certainly unkind to the infants involved as well.
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- In Pinker’s general description of maternal choices, we find a perplexity. He tells us that "even when a mother in a hunter-gatherer society hardens her heart to sacrifice a newborn, her heart has not turned to stone. Anthropologists who interview these women (or their relatives, since the event is often too painful for the woman to discuss) discover that the women see the death as an unavoidable tragedy, grieve at the time and remember the child with pain all their lives" (emphasis added). Here, however, the evidence apparently contradicts Pinker’s claim that mothers don’t form an emotional attachment toward their infants until the days after their cool assessment and decision. Where is there any emotional tie in Pinker’s model of coolly assessing mothers that could possibly account for such lifelong anguish over having killed the infant?
- In his description of teen mothers in our society, Pinker seems correct (at least, in some cases) in noting that the woman is "immature enough to have hoped that her pregnancy would go away by itself." But when this is the case, how plausible is it to hold that the girl is psychologically normal, as Pinker maintains? Surely such extreme denial can hardly be chalked up to ordinary immaturity.
  - Chris Morrow about 4 hours ago
    
    But some pregancies *do* go away by themselves, in the form of miscarriages. So you don't have to be a total freak to hope that yours will.
- Since clear-headed biology alone can’t settle the question, Pinker cites philosophers: "Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. Most philosophers (to say nothing of nonphilosophers) recoil from that last step, but the very fact that there can be a debate about the personhood of neonates, but no debate about the personhood of older children, makes it clearer why we feel more sympathy for an Amy Grossberg than for a Susan Smith."