Talk:Infanticide

In many ancient cultures, including those of ancient Greece, Rome, India, China, and Japan, harsh conditions or cultural mores occasionally resulted in the harsh choice to end the lives of newly-born infants.

Occasionally? I'm not sure it was as rare as all that.

Alas, you're probably right. I seem to recall that it was standard practice for Roman infants to be brought before the paterfamilias, who would then decide whether the kid was to be exposed or not... but I don't trust my recollection enough to put it in the article. The topic really deserves a thorough discussion - which I don't have the expertise to provide, alas. -- April

Something I'd like to integrate into the article somehow:

[throughout history, only women took care of children]

The problem with having only women raising children is that parenting is an emotionally demanding task, requiring considerable maturity, and throughout history girls have grown up universally despised. When a girl was born, said the Hebrews, "the walls wept."59 Japanese lullabies sang, "If it's a girl, stamp on her."60 In medieval Muslim cultures "a grave used to be prepared, even before delivery, beside the woman's resting place [and] if the new-born was a female she was immediately thrown by her mother into the grave."61 "Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter" was a popular Italian proverb that was meant quite literally.62 Girls from birth have everywhere been considered full of dangerous pollution-the projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more often killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys. Girls in traditional societies spent most of their growing up years trying to avoid being raped by their neighbors or employers and thereby being forced into a lives of prostitution. To expect horribly abused girls to magically become mature, loving caretakers when as teenagers they go to live as virtual slaves in a strange family simply goes against the conclusions of every clinical study we have showing the disastrous effects of trauma upon the ability to mother.63 (http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln08_childrearing.html)

The point that childrearing is an emotionally demanding task often left to women who may also have inadequate social and emotional support/resources is an interesting and important point. But it is wrong to state that "Girls from birth have everywhere been considered full of dangerous pollution-the projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more often killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys." This is true of many societies but probably not most and most definitely not all. By the way, where do "the Hebrews" say that the walls weep when a girl is born? I am suspicious of the other quotes too, as they are taken out of context -- although I do get the general point, and think it is important. SR

59. Barbara Kaye Greenleaf, Children Through the Ages: A History of Childhood. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978, p. 7.

Funny, this does not look like a Hebrew text. An assertion that "When a girl was born, said the Hebrews, 'the walls wept.'" should be supported by a citation of a Hebrew document.

You can look up the citations yourself next time.

The context of the quotes doesn't matter. Whether it was literal or figurative, it represents the wishes of people in those time periods. And we know from independent evidence that female children were despised. For example, in ancient Greece, almost no families raised 2 daughters. I'm sure they raised sons though. The evidence is so overwhelming (coming from multiple sources throughout history), that I wonder how you can question the fact.

Also you missed one point. Parenting wasn't "often" left to women. It was always left to women. It's only very recently (this century only), and then only in advanced societies, where parenting is "often" left to women. This point is discussed in detail in the sections preceding the one I quoted above. -- ark

Later on, there is a whole section on 'Infanticide as Child Sacrifice' at (http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln08_childrearing.html)

Although poverty played some part in this holocaust of children, it is doubtful if it was the main cause of child deaths. In the first place, the cost of bringing up a girl is no more than the cost of bringing up a boy, so the differential infanticide rates are certainly parental choices. When, for instance, Arabs dug a grave next to the birthing place of every new mother so "if the newborn child was a female she could be immediately thrown by her mother into the grave,"105 it was likely hatred of girls, not poverty, that was the motive. Secondly, if scarce resources were the main cause, then wealthy parents should kill less than poor. But the historical record shows exactly the opposite: historical boy/girl ratios are higher among wealthy parents,106 where economic necessity is no problem at all. Even in early modern England, the infant mortality rates for wealthy children were higher than the same rates for ordinary farmers, day laborers and craftsman.107 Thirdly, many wealthy high civilizations such as Greece, Rome, China, India, Hawaii and Tahiti are very infanticidal, especially among their elite classes. As one visitor to Hawaii reported, there probably wasn't a single mother who didn't throw one or more of her children to the sharks.108 There were even societies where virtually all newborn were killed to satisfy their overwhemling infanticidal needs, and infants had to be imported from adjoining groups to continue the society.109 Finally, many nations-like in Japan until recently-kill their children selectively in order to balance out an equal number of boys and girls, a practice called mabiki, or "thinning out" the less promising ones,110 again revealing a quite different motive than the purely economic. It is most certainly not economics that causes so many depressed women on the delivery tables even today to implore their mothers not to kill them after they have given birth.111 Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really" belonged to God-a symbol of the grandmother, and that "the child was a gift that God had every right to reclaim."112 When killing her child, therefore, the mother was simply acting as her own mother's avenger.

[two more paragraphs, one of them not so relevant, the other very relevant]

Opposition by society to infanticide was negligible until modern times. Jews considered any child who died within thirty days after birth, even by violence, to have been a "miscarriage."122 Most ancient societies openly approved of infanticide, and although Roman law, in response to Christianity, made infanticide a capital offense in 374 C.E., no cases have been found punishing it.123 Anglo-Saxons actually considered infanticide a virtue, not a crime, saying, "A child cries when he comes into the world, for he anticipates its wretchedness. It is well for him that he should die...he was placed on a slanting roof [and] if he laughed, he was reared, but if he was frightened and cried, he was thrust out to perish."124 Prosecutions for infanticide before the modern period were rare.125 Even medieval penitentials excused mothers who killed their newborn before feeding them.126 By Puritan times, a few mothers began being hanged for infanticide.127 But even in the nineteenth century it was still "not an uncommon spectacle to see the corpses of infants lying in the streets or on the dunghills of London and other large cities.128 The English at the end of the century had over seven million children enrolled in "burial insurance societies;" with the infant mortality rate at 50 percent, parents could easily collect the insurance by killing their child. As one doctor said, "sudden death in infants is too common a circumstance to be brought before the attention of the coroner...Free medical care for children was refused...'No, thank you, he is in two burial clubs' was a frequent reply to offers of medical assistance for a sick child. Arsenic was a favorite poison..."129

A lot of what this author says is extremely radical and controversial (though that doesn't mean it's any the less authoritative). What I'm quoting is neither radical nor controversial, at least for anyone acquainted with history. Widespread and routine infanticide are very well documented. And certainly, one can't understand ancient history without it.

I don't like to quote so extensively but I prefer to do it here than in the article. -- ark

Let's be very clear about how "Loving" infanticidal people are towards children. They're not! Anyone who reports them as such is delusional. It's that simple.

Now, the proof of this is only slightly more complex.

do the infanticidal parents' touching of the infants differ in any way from a dildo? No.
do the infanticidal parents pay attention to the needs of the infant or child? Absolutely not.
do the infanticidal parents even look in the eyes of the infant or child? No.

From these considerations alone, one must conclude that the anthropologists involved are hallucinating. Or seriously deluding themselves.

Why was the section on the Chinese situation redundant. The notion that female infanticide is common in China is common enough that it bears some discussion about why demographers don't think it is common.

Which is discussed on the one child policy page. IOW, redundant.

Removed this statement.......

Infanticide can be deduced from very skewed birth statistics. The natural male to female birth ratio is slightly below 1:1. And the life expectancy of females is naturally greater than males. When a society has a male to female ratio of 2:1 or 3:1 in children or adults, infanticide is a safe conclusion.

There are areas of China and India which have extremely skewed birth rates which are due to sex-selective abortions.

Slash and burn fuckers. Then mention abortion damnit!

Removed, Wetnursing was itself an infanticidal practice since the wetnurse usually killed her own child to leave milk for others'. This is a highly dubious claim; I'd like to see where it's supported in the literature. Given non-infanticidal child mortality rates in non-technological societies, the existence of wet-nurses is not in itself evidence of infanticide! In addition, some wet-nurses supported another family's infant and their own newborn simultaneously, though this practice sometimes left one or both infants short of full nutrition. -- April, Friday, July 19, 2002

Are you sure about that last sentence? My understanding is that, in nursing women, milk production increases or decreases according to demand. --Stephen Gilbert

To a certain extent, I think it does. We should also consider that, in many cultures with high infant mortality, wet nurses were sometimes mothers who had lost their own infants. Moreover, babies were generally nursed for longer periods in the pre-modern world, so a woman could wean one child and keep the milk flow by taking on another. J Hofmann Kemp

The paragraph talking about infanticide through "killing nurses" is talking about the Victorian era, and excludes (perhaps not explicitly enough) such primitives as "non-technological societies". Additionally, since the high mortality rates in "non-technological" societies are due to infanticide one can hardly use those rates to excuse infanticide!

In primitive societies, nursing occurs for the sexual arousal of the mother, not the child's needs. In more advanced societies (say, Victorian era) nursing is considered dirty and foisted off on complete strangers.

From Evolution of Childrearing (Chapter 8):

The wetnurse herself was usually an infanticidal mother. The common practice was to require that she get rid of her own baby in order to nurse the stranger - termed "a life for a life" by parents in the past.215 Montaigne laments "Every day we snatch children from the arms of their mothers and put our own in their charge for a very small payment."216 Society thought this system fair, since "by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the offspring of the wealthy will be preserved."217 It is not surprising, then, that wetnurses were universally described as "vicious, slothful and inclined to drunkenness,"218 "debauched, indolent, superstitious,"219 guilty of "gross negligence...leaving babies...unattended when helping with the harvest...crawling or falling into the fire and being attacked by animals, especially pigs,"220 "hung from a nail like a bundle of old clothes...the unfortunate one remains thus crucified [with] a purple face and violently compressed chest."221 The wetnurses' superstitions included a belief "in favor of cradle cap and of human wastes, which were thought to have therapeutic value,"222 so infants were rarely washed and lived in their own feces and urine for their entire time at nurse: "Infants sat in animal and human filth, were suspended on a hook in unchanged swaddling bands or were slung from the rafters in an improvised hammock...their mouths crammed with rotting rags."223 Even live-in wetnurses were described as unfeeling:

When he cried she used to shake him-when she washed him she used to stuff the sponge in his little mouth-push her finger (beast!) in his little throat-say she hated the child, wished he were dead-used to let him lie on the floor screaming while she sat quietly by and said screams did not annoy her...224

Complaints by physicians that wetnurses let infants die of simple neglect were legion: "While the women attend to the vineyards, the infant remains alone...swaddled to a board and suspended from a hook on the wall...crying and hungry in putrid diapers. Often the child cries so hard it ends up with a hernia...turkeys peck out the eyes of a child...or they fall into a fire, or drown in pails left carelessly on doorsteps."225 Children were described as being "kept ragged and bare, sickly and starved...in terror of their nurse, who handed out blows and vituperation freely" or who "tied them up by the shoulders and wrists with ragged ends of sheets...face down on the floor...to protect them from injuring themselves while she was away...Never played with or cuddled...it is a holiday when they are taken for a walk around the room by the nurses..."226 Infants who are sent to "killing nurses" are described as being fed while the nurse croons, "Cry no more! Soon you will go, deté drago, soon...'Tis truly better that you go, dear infant...onto the lap of Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus."227 The destructive Mother of Jesus, who gave birth for him to be sacrificed, was never far away from the child. It is no wonder that well into the nineteenth century many areas had a two-thirds mortality rate of infants sent to wetnurse.228

Problems with this. You're using shoddy scholarship to try to back up an unprovable claim. De Mause provides no analysis or discussion of his sources, merely a catalog of horrific quotes. We cannot tell the context, nor can we take them as representative. THe most they prove is that, in the early modern and modern periods (there's nothing here before the 17th c. I checked the citations), some wetnurses may have been infanticidal and were most likely abusive. THere is nothing to support your assertions of this type of behavior as a norm or even a trend. Anybody can go through books and pick out quotes (even totally out of context) to make an argument. Since de Mause's work is criminally lax in scholarship, I suggest you try to use better sources. J Hofmann Kemp

Are you also going to accuse Noam Chomsky of being "criminally lax in scholarship" because he doesn't provide full context with his 1000-per book quotes? There are simply too many quotes for it to be possible to provide full context, but then you're not interested in being reasonable, only in defending your position at all costs. -- Ark

Just re-read "A Modest Proposal," and could see absolutely nothing that referred to rotting corpses of babies in the streets. The only reference was to children accompanying their mothers begging. This certainly makes me question the veracity of other statements in this article. Moreover, Swift was born at the time of a particularly virulent wave of the plague ... even if there were piles of corpese in his memory, I'd be hard pressed not to wonder if these were not the result of plague or epidemic -- both of which were common in Early Modern cities. Either way, Swift is certainly not Victorian, which is also something the article implied. J Hofmann Kemp 12:28 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

My fault for the Swift ref, I took it out.

As for "plagues and epidemics", they make a useful cover for infanticide. My impression is the Victorians were infanticidal. It is a reasonable impression (for fuck's sake; Nazi Germany was infanticidal) and unless someone comes up with a specific period when parents stopped being infanticidal, I'll trust my impressions over the protests of some jerk living in denial.

I see no reason why I should work harder on this article than my lazy opponents just because the majority of people are idiots similarly living in denial. I am dealing with morons who refuse to accept that incest, infanticide and child abuse have EVER existed despite the massive amounts of evidence to the contrary. So when these morons grudgingly admit that these things did happen at specific points in time and in specific places, that simply isn't fucking good enough for me. I don't accept the judgement of idiots. So if no one here is reasonably intelligent, educated and open-minded, I'll say what conclusions can be supported from the evidence (which I don't feel the least need to spell out to you lazy bums). -- Ark

Hi Ark,

I have only been here at Wikipedia for a few months but I have found most people here to be pretty open minded when confronted with hard evidence. Can you give me a few clues or a summary of what you remember of the evidence so I can search for similar sources online?

BTW I would appreciate it if you could keep the obscenities down as my niece and nephew (who are minors) might join me here occasionally for homework research, composition practice, etc.

Thanks! user:mirwin

http://www.baxleystamps.com/litho/smith_47020225.shtml This might be a useful source. Unfortunately only an outline is available at this link. Chapter 30 addresses infanticide in a region of China. user:mirwin

Another fishy thing: In all the imprecations cast against wetnurses, there is no notice taken that Breastfeeding women don't get pregnant and that they can feed more than one infant.

Which only means they'd have more than one infant they were wetnursing at one time. None of them need be their own. Above all, the milk-production capacity of a woman is finite.

I took this out until it can be verified, mostly because of my objections raised above. I am very uncomfortable relying on the very questionable work of what appears to be one social scientist -- especially one whose work is not really accepted by the mainstream. J Hofmann Kemp

No, you took it out because you can't accept that infanticide occured so close to the modern era. It makes you uncomfortable that you can't dismiss the entire thing to the grey mists at the dawn of human history. -- Ark

No, Ark -- I am fully aware that we live in a society where people do horrible things to children. I am also aware that this has long been the case. There are plenty of records out there for at least the Victorian area on things like the treatment of children in workhouses, and they clearly indicate widespread abuse of minors and women. I removed what I did because I re-read Swift and the deMause article you used as sources. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a lot of stuff quoted out of context. Some of the sources, like Philippe Ariés, I've read -- he has written brilliant history, well-documented and respected. He's also written psychohistory which is mostly supposition based on scant evidence. If you want things to stay unchallenged, you've got to make sure they have recognizable merit.J Hofmann Kemp

Hi, Ark. Welcome back. Your contribution to this subject has the potential to be very valuable. Also, bear in mind that how you present yourself in the talk pages makes a strong impression on others. We are impressed with solid scholarship, but we also enjoy a cordial atmosphere.

You may not be aware that phrases like "you can't accept" or "you can't dismiss" are taken personally. Now, if you and I were talking on the phone (or better, in person), it would be easy for me to perceive the gentle spirit behind the words. But, alas, we get only the bare text here.

I myself am very much against infanticide and child abuse, so anything you can do to expose these crimes in the article pages would be welcome to me. Let's discuss what we can each do to help each other make excellent articles on such worthy topics. Ed Poor 12:01 Aug 13, 2002 (PDT)

Hi Ed,

I ran a google.com advanced search on keywords (roman infanticide opium) Wikipedia came up at the top and the other links were pretty weak.

http://65.1911encyclopedia.org/I/IN/INFANTICIDE.htm

Mentions the method of smearing a mother's breast with opium but cites it as in use among the upper classes of India. No mention of Rome. This makes me wonder if we have introduced an error in this statement: "A practice described in Roman texts was to smear the breast with opium residue so that a nursing baby would die with no outward cause." If the Roman texts are describing a practice in India then perhaps we should say so. It would be nice if we had citations for the Roman texts and English translations.

user:mirwin

Found Lloyd Demause, "Foundations of Psychohistory", online at:

http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p23x41.htm

On page 26, "The history of infanticide in the West has yet to be written, and I shall not attempt it here. But enough is already known to establish that, contrary to the usual assumption that it is an Eastern rather than a Western problem, infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was a regular practice of antiquity, that the killing of legitimate children was only slowly reduced during the Middle Ages, and that illegitimate children continued regularly to be killed right up into the nineteenth century.(110)"

A lot of references at 110. For someone who is not going to attempt the history "here", he sure manages a lot of gory detail in the next couple of pages.

user:mirwin

Did you note that most of his primary sources were read in translation, and that most of his secondary sources were from before 1940? Also, most of the primary source examples I've seen from this work are taken as representative of a society, when some of them (for example, the stuff about the dauphin, for instance) may well not have been. One has to remember that some people (Suetonius, for example) wrote to both discredit and to scandalize -- if the population at large were to disapprove, then should we take the reported actions as a norm? This is why I think we need to look beyond deMause for evidence to support Ark's arguments. De Mause is only one of thousands of people writing on child abuse and infanticide. Surely ther must be other contemporary scholars out there? As an historian, I can see great gaping holes in deMause's use of sources. It doesn't make him wrong, but it certainly sets off warning bells -- if the scholarshp doesn't stand up, then are the conclusions he draws really proven? As to the dauphin thing -- if it's what I think it is, it's the primary source for a book by Philippe Ariés -- de Mause has basically taken the same passages (possibly from A's book without reading the whole) and recycled them. IIRC, the dauphin in question was the future Louis XIII. The book also discussed his toilet training in great detail. The problem is, this one record (from an observer, not the main subject) was not only used to draw a complex psychological portrait of the king. Moreover, much of what was said about Louis' childhood was assumed to have been the norm for children of the time -- which is kind of odd, considering that most people looking for social norms do not look at one person -- let alone the person at the top of the social pyramid -- and assume that it's normal. 'nuff said. J Hofmann Kemp

Dr. Kemp, you make some excellent points. I will attempt to keep them in mind as I look for alternate sources to augment our arguments. user:mirwin

http://www.trentu.ca/ahb/ahb10/ahb-10-3-4a.html#b31 This is an applicable discussion of 5 primary Greek sources. The author argues strongly that the evidence does not support strong conclusions that infanticide practices involving birth defects were uniform and widespread. On the contrary, the discussion points out many reasons to suspect/conclude that many infants with abnormal development or defects survived to productive adult status.

That's useful for Greek societies, but there are quite a few other cultures involved here. I remember from some folklore classes that in one culture, central African IIRC, twins were regarded as unlucky and were thus usually killed at birth. The "real" answer seems to be that many, many different factors came into play. -- April

To counter the argument, the following four references cited in that article that Mirwin points to support the concept that infanticide of children with birth defect was common in ancient Greece:
- D.W. Amundsen, 'Medicine and the Birth of Defective Children: Approaches of the Ancient World', in Euthanasia and the Newborn: Conflicts Regarding Saving Lives, Philosophy and Medicine 24, ed. R. McMillan et al. (Dordrecht 1987) 10, 13
- P. Carrick, Medical Ethics in Antiquity: Philosophical Perspectives on Abortion and Euthanasia (Dordrecht 1985) 102
- E. Eyben, 'Family Planning in Graeco-Roman Antiquity', AncSoc 11/12 (1980/1981) 15, 35
- W.L. Langer, 'Infanticide: A Historical Survey', History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1974) 353-4.
The article itself doesn't argue against defect as a reason for infanticide, just that it did not occur in all or most cases.

As an admitted non-expert in the field, what bothers me most about Ark's contribution is the following: (a) His contributions are all taken from the same single source, and that, as JHK points out, is a secondary, not a primary source. That's not background research, that's dogmatic upholding of one author's claims. (b) He has presumed only one explanation for various situations, where several have been proposed, and apparently does not wish any coverage given to opposing views. That's against the NPOV policy. (c) He uses name-calling, baseless accusations, and downright rudeness in dealing with fellow contributors, whose sole fault seems to be editing his articles or objecting to his points. That's against Wikipetiquette. Thus, if Ark feels that his viewpoint is not being adequately represented, I suggest he (a) unearth other sources, preferably primary ones, in its defense; (b) allow space for contrary positions to be included in articles without complaining or removing it; (c) use reasonable courtesy in discussing the proper balance of elements in the article. That is, I think, a more productive approach.

Reverted back to a non-babies piled in the streets, wetnursing is infaticidal version until we can actually see some hard evidence. Just some actual sources other than deMause (or something based on deMause). Again, this is not because I don't believe infanticide didn't exist, but that I don't see evidence that it was as normal as was implied. My analogy -- 20-odd people were arrested last week for being part of a pedophile parnography ring. More upsetting to me was the fact that many of these people were the parents of the children being subjected to sexual abuse -- and they were apparently profiting from it financially. Many of these parents were in the US, but some were in other countries. The kind of reasoning so far demonstrated in the article might conclude that more Americans abuse their children in this way than do parents in other countries. Or that parents with access to the internet are more likely to be abusers. Or, considering the large number of abductions, rape, other sexual abuse, and sometimes killings of children present in the news over the past few months, sexual abuse of children is the norm in western society. I can't prove it, of course, but I think that that is probably NOT the case, i.e., it is not the norm, nor is it normative. However, it is certainly something of which we should be aware, and to which we as a society should respond and remedy. That latter, though, is my own opinion, and possibly not appropriate for an article. J Hofmann Kemp

I am very disturbed by the number of times the phrase "non-Western" is creeping into this discussion. It seems as if someone is trying to argue here that there is a kind of "moral unfitness" of non-Westerners to raise children; an encyclopedia is definitely not the place for such arguments to be made, and it's very far from NPOV. The sad fact is that infanticide has taken place in all cultures, and the prevalence of it has been tied more to the level of technology than to any East/West divide. If "non-technological" is meant, why not use that? -- April

The problem of aborting females or killing girl babies (in so far as it actually exists) does seem to exist primarily in India and China, see The World; Modern Asia's Anomaly: The Girls Who Don't Get Born User:Fredbauder

From a previous version:

There are well-documented accounts of infanticide performed by hospital personnel in China immediately upon the birth of an out-of-quota child, to enforce the goverment's one child policy. The practice, although required by the government, is not widespread as over-quota mothers usually are forced to have an abortion long before bringing the baby to term. China requires all women of child-bearing age to take pregnancy tests at government clinics every 3 months.

If this can be verified (I would accept a New York Times article reporting this) it needs to be in the article. If not official policy then it is simply crime in China. The implication that it is official government policy is not acceptable in the absence of some evidence. I doubt very much any evidence exists. My own hypothesis is that corruption expains any incidents as local officials try illegally to meet centrally issued quotas. User:Fredbauder