Giubilini and Minerva overlook the fact that by these definitions, comatose but curable individuals are also not persons, and so presumably may be dispatched. Such patients clearly cannot attribute any value to their own existence; and that with medical attention they could do so merely makes them potential persons: so they still fail to make the grade. Indeed, not attributing value to one's own existence is a good diagnostic description of the severe depressive — so the horsegun for him or her too then.

According to this description of personhood, there is no difference between a fetus and a neonate; and if it is legal and moral to end the life of the former, then so must it be for the latter: "actual people's well-being could be threatened by the new (even if healthy) child requiring energy, money and care which the family might happen to be in short supply of. Sometimes this situation can be prevented through an abortion, but in some other cases this is not possible. In these cases, since non-persons have no moral rights to life, there are no reasons for banning after-birth abortions." And just to be clear, "such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk".

Giubilini and Minerva draw our attention to the infamous 2004 Groningen Protocol, which sets out the conditions under which Dutch doctors can perform euthanasia on infants with severe birth defects, and to a 2005 paper in arguably the world's premier medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, reflecting on and reporting the Dutch experience of 22 cases of infant euthanasia, so we are not after all concerned here with mere theory. Infant euthanasia is, rest assured, illegal in the Netherlands, though none of the doctors involved in these cases has been prosecuted. The paper indicates that such grave considerations as "predicted lack of self-sufficiency" and "expected hospital dependency" weighed heavily in arriving at the decision to end the child's life. And with a straight face, the authors gravely recommend that "after the decision has been made and the child has died, an outside legal body should determine whether the decision was justified." So that's OK then.