Footnotes

• Twitter @Neonatalethics

• Funding JS was supported for this work by grants from the Wellcome trust WT106587/Z/14/Z, WT203132/Z/16/Z.

• Competing interests None declared.

• Patient consent for publication Not required.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

• ↵We do not want to claim that biological life below the relational threshold has zero value. Such individuals might have some positive wellbeing. Rather, the idea is that this is a threshold for a particular (and important) kind of value to be realised.

• ↵In some philosophical contexts, ’self-consciousness’ is taken to refer to a fairly high-level capacity — such as having a concept of self. It’s something that no infant has, even if perfectly normal. But we take it that that high-level capacity is not really necessary for a minimal two-way relationship (and suggest that normal newborn infants do have relational capacity).