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.
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.
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.