Infanticide

Infanticide in History

Historically, the practice of infanticide dates as far back as prehistoric societies, where infant sacrifice was routinely used as a means of maintaining a balance between population growth and scarcity of resources. Therefore, disabled or sickly infants were at higher risk because of the burden they placed on the survival of the society. In some tribal cultures, it was common practice in a twin birth to kill the weaker of the two infants if it was believed that both could not be supported.

The earliest recorded historical references from the Babylonian and Chaldean civilizations, dating from 4000 to 2000 B.C.E., indicate that infanticide was widely practiced in these societies. Exposure was routinely used as a method of population control with an explicit intent to cleanse the society of the sickly and disabled. For example, parents of deformed or small newborns were ordered to take their infants to a mountain and leave them there overnight. If they were still alive in the morning, [Page 560]they were permitted to live. Under Roman law, infanticide was considered a private matter and a fathers' domain was given absolute legal authority to govern all matters within their own households.

Throughout much of Asia, in both ancient and more contemporary culture, female infanticide has been commonly practiced. According to scholars, the status of women as property in early Muslim and 7th-century Arabia may explain this custom; there is some conjecture that mothers frequently disposed of their female babies in order to spare them the life of misery they themselves knew. Traditional Chinese culture reveals a long history of female infanticide, and female newborns were openly killed in China until the late 1800s. Daughters have long been regarded as less valuable and therefore more undesirable due to their inability to carry on the family name and because they are seen as an economic burden, especially in cultures where the bride's family is expected to pay a substantial dowry.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, a child born out of wedlock was considered illegitimate, not deserving of the ordinary entitlements of those born into marriage. At the same time, infanticide was declared a crime. The association between the stigma of illegitimacy and infanticide during this time in European society was so widely acknowledged that infanticide was considered a crime committed almost exclusively by unmarried women. The punishment for this crime ranged from burial alive to decapitation and drowning. The societal perspective of infanticide as a criminal act committed by desperate and/or immoral women shifted in the 20th century as research began to suggest that mental illness might account for the crime of infanticide.

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