Infanticide



Infanticide is the practice of someone intentionally causing the death of an infant. Often it is the mother who commits the act, but criminology recognises various forms of non-maternal child murder. In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible, whereas in most modern societies the practice is considered immoral and criminal. Nonetheless, it still takes place &mdash; in the Western world usually because of the parent's mental illness or violent behavior, and in some poor countries as a form of population control, sometimes with tacit societal acceptance. Female infanticide is more common than the killing of male babies due to sex-selective infanticide.

In the United Kingdom, the Infanticide Act defines "infanticide" as a specific crime that can only be committed by the mother during the first twelve months of her baby's life. The broader notion of infanticide, as described below, is the subject matter of this article.

Infanticide throughout history and pre-history
The practice of infanticide has taken many forms. Child sacrifice to supernatural figures or forces, such as the one practiced in ancient Carthage, may be only the most notorious example in the ancient world. Regardless of the reasons, throughout history infanticide has been common. Anthropologist Laila Williamson noted:

Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.

A frequent method of infanticide in ancient Europe and Asia was simply to abandon the infant, leaving it to die by exposure. In the Oceania tribes infanticide was carried out by suffocating the infant, while in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in the Inca Empire it was carried out by sacrifice (see below).

Paleolithic and Neolithic
Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50% of the total number of births in prehistoric times. Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20%. Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture. Comparative anthropologists have calculated that 50% of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.

In ancient history
Child sacrifice, the ritualistic killing of children in order to please supernatural beings, was far more common in ancient history than in present times.

In the New World
Archaeologists have uncovered physical evidence of child sacrifice at several locations. Some of the best attested examples are the diverse rites which were part of the religious practices in Mesoamerica and the Inca Empire.

In the Old World
Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 BCE. In Carthage "[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith." Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.

Carthage
Phoenicians and Carthaginians sacrificed infants to their gods. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46–120 CE) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Caananites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century BCE, Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.

Greece and Rome
The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice. However, exposure of newborns was widely practiced in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against it. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 BCE, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
 * "Know that I am still in Alexandria. [...] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it."

In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tables of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 CE, but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.

Judaism
Although there are many instances in the Bible of ancient Hebrews sacrificing their children to heathen gods (e.g., Deuteronomy 12:30-31, 18:10; 2 Kings 16:3 & 17:17, 30-31 & 21:6 & 23:4, 10; Jeremiah 7:31-32 & 19:5 & 32:35; Ezekial 16: 20-21, 31; Judges 11:31), Judaism prohibits infanticide. Roman historians wrote about the ideas and customs of other peoples, which often diverged from their own. Tacitus recorded that the Jews "regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children." Josephus, whose works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, wrote that God "forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward."

Pagan European tribes
In his book Germania, Tacitus wrote that the ancient Germanic tribes enforced a similar prohibition. He found such mores remarkable and commented: "[The Germani] hold it shameful to kill any unwanted child." Modern scholarship differs. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. "It was the custom of the [Teutonic] pagans, that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food."

In his highly influential Pre-historic Times, John Lubbock described burnt bones indicating the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.

Christianity
Christianity rejected infanticide. The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said "You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born." The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command. So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 CE Constantine considered infanticide a crime, and in 374 CE Valentinian mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was homicide, and in 589 CE the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.

Middle Ages
Whereas theologians and clerics preached sparing their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents. According to William L. Langer, exposure in the Middle Ages "was practiced on gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference". At the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber river even in day light.

Child sacrifice was practiced by the Gauls, Celts and the Irish. "They would kill their piteous wretched offspring with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood around Crom Cruaich", a deity of pre-Christian Ireland.

Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn. In Gotland, Sweden, children were also sacrificed.

Russia
In Russia, peasants sacrificed their sons and daughters to the pagan god Perun. Although Church law forbid infanticide, it used to be practiced. Some rural people threw children to the swine. In Medieval Russia secular laws did not deal with what, for the church, was a crime. The Svans killed the newborn females by filling their mouths with hot ashes.

In Kamchatka, babies were killed and thrown to the dogs. American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the 19th century. One of the twins was always sacrificed.

China
Marco Polo, the famed explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi. China's society promoted gendercide. Philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century BCE, who developed a school of law, wrote: "As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death." Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhwei, Szechwan, Jiangxi and Fukien a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called "baby water".

Japan
In Japan the common slang for infanticide used to be "mabiki". It has been estimated that 40% of newborn babies were killed in Kyushu. A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby's mouth and nose. Mabiki persisted in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

India and Pakistan
Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in India. According to Firishta, as soon as a female child was born she was hold "in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death". The practice of female infanticide was also common among the Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Gujarat, Miazed, Kalowries and Sind (Pakistan) inhabitants.

It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the sharks in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.

Arabia
Some authors believe that there is little evidence that infanticide was prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia or early Muslim history, except for the case of the Tamim tribe, who practiced it during severe famine. Others state that "female infanticide was common all over Arabia during this period of time" (pre-Islamic Arabia), especially by burying alive a female newborn.

Islam
Infanticide is explicitly prohibited by the Qur'an. "And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; surely to kill them is a great wrong."

Tribes
Infanticide in tribal societies was more frequent than infanticide in both Western and Eastern civilizations.

Africa
In Africa some children were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Ibo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The Kikuyu, Kenya's most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins. Lucien Lévy-Brühl noted that, because of fear of a drought, if a baby was born feet first in British East Africa, she or he was smothered. The Tswana people did the same since they feared the newborn would bring ill fortune to the parents. Similarly, William Sumner noted that the Vadshagga killed children whose upper incisors came first. If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.

In The Child in Primitive Society, Nathan Miller wrote in the 1920s that among the Kuni tribe every mother had killed at least one of her children. Child sacrifice was practiced as late as 1929 in Zimbabwe, where a daughter of the tribal chief used to be sacrificed as a petition of rain.

Oceania
Infanticide among the autochthone people in the Oceania islands is widespread. In some areas of the Fiji islands up to 50% of newborn infants were killed. In the 19th century Ugi, in the Solomon islands almost 75% of the indigenous children had been brought from adjoining tribes due to the high incidence rate of infanticide, a unique feature of these tribal societies. In another Solomon island, San Cristóbal, the firstborn was considered "ahubweu" and often buried alive. As a rationale for their behavior, some parents in British New Guinea complained: "Girls [...] don't become warriors, and they don't stay to look for us in our old age."

Australia
According to Bronislaw Malinowski, who wrote a book on indigenous Australians in the early 1960s, "infanticide is practiced among all Australian natives." The practice has been reported in Tasmania, Western Australia, Central Australia, South Australia, in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Anthropologist Géza Róheim wrote: "When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure."

Family units usually consisted of three children. Brough Smyth, a 19th century researcher, estimated that in Victoria about 30% of the births resulted in infanticide. Mildred Dickeman concurs that that figure is accurate in other Australia tribes as a result of a surplus of the birthrate. Cannibalism was observed in Victoria at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wotjo tribe, as well as the tribes of the lower Murray River, sometimes killed a newborn to feed an older sibling.

Thomas Robert Malthus wrote that, in the New South Wales region, when the mother died sucking infants were buried alive with her. In the Darling River region, infanticide was practiced "by a blow on the back of the head, by strangling with a rope, or chocking with sand".

In Queensland a tribal woman could have children after the age of thirty. Otherwise babies would be killed.

The Aranda tribes in the Northern Territory used the method of choking the newborn with coal, sand or kill her with a stick.

According to James George Frazer, in the Beltana tribes in South Australia it was customary to kill the first-born.

Twins were always killed by the Arrernte in central Australia. In the Luritcha tribe occasional cannibalism of young children occurred.

Aram Yengoyan calculated that, in Western Australia, the Pitjandjara people killed 19% of their newborns.

In the 19th century the native Tasmanians were exterminated by the colonists, who regarded them as a degenerate race. Richard H. Davies (fl. 1830s - 1887), a brother of Archdeacon Davies, wrote that Tasmanian "females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies", which were later used for hunting. Like other tribal Australians, when the mother died the child was buried as well.

Polynesia
In ancient Polynesian societies infanticide was common. Families were supposed to rear no more than two children. Writing about the natives, Raymond Firth noted: "If another child is born, it is buried in the earth and covered with stones".

Hawaii
In Hawaii infanticide was a socially sanctioned practice before the Christian missions. Infanticidal methods included strangling the children or, more frequently, burying them alive.

Tahiti
Infanticide was quite intense in Tahiti. Methods included suffocation, neck breaking and strangulation.

North America
Infanticide and child sacrifice was practiced in the New World at times when in Western Europe it was largely abandoned.

Inuit
There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Eskimo population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15-50% to 80%.

Polar Eskimos killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea. There is even a legend in Eskimo folklore, "The Unwanted Child", where a mother throws her child into the fjord.

The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by first stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die. In Arctic Canada the Eskimos exposed their babies on the ice and left to die.

Female Eskimo infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures from the South.

Canada
The Handbook of North American Indians reports infanticide and cannibalism among the Dene Indians and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.

Native Americans
In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide. For the Maidu native Americans twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well. In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.

Mexico
Bernal Díaz recounted that, after landing on the Veracruz coast, they came across a temple dedicated to Tezcatlipoca. "That day they had sacrificed two boys, cutting open their chests and offering their blood and hearts to that accursed idol". In The Conquest of New Spain Díaz describes more child sacrifices in the towns before the Spaniards reached the large Aztec city Tenochtitlan.

South America
Although academic data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as the one of North America, the estimates seem to be similar.

Brazil
The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman. Furthermore, no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced. The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.

Peru, Paraguay and Bolivia
While Capacocha was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide. Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50% of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried. The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.

Present day
The practice has become less common in the Western world, but continues today in areas of extremely high poverty and overpopulation, such as parts of China and India. Female infants, then and even now, are particularly vulnerable, a factor in gendercide.

In Africa
In spite of the fact that it is illegal, in Benin, West Africa, parents secretly continue with infanticidal customs.

In India
The practice has continued in some rural areas of India.

According to a recent report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) up to 50 million girls and women are missing in India's population as a result of systematic gender discrimination. In India there are less than 93 women for every 100 men in the population. The accepted reason for such a disparity is the practice of female infanticide, prompted by the existence of a dowry system which requires the family to pay out a great amount of money when a female child is married. For a poor family, the birth of a girl child can signal the beginning of financial ruin and extreme hardship'.

Hinduism
Hinduism prohibits infanticide but it is practiced by some segments of the Hindu society. The northern states of India have the lowest female ratio in India, purportedly due to female infanticide.

Sikhism
Sikhism prohibits infanticide and the Golden Temple priests issued a prohibition of the practice among Sikhs. The Indian state of Punjab, home to the Sikhs, has the lowest female ratio in India: again, presumably due to female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. The Sikh immigrants in England also have low female ratio of children due to female foeticide.

The situation in China
There have been some accusations that infanticide occurs in the People's Republic of China due to the one-child policy, although most demographers do not believe that the practice is widespread. In the 1990s, a certain stretch of the Yangtze River was known to be a common site of infanticide by drowning, until government projects made access to it more difficult. Others assert that China has twenty-five million fewer girl children than expected, but sex selective abortion can partially be to blame. The illegal use of ultrasound is widespread in China, and itinerant sonographers with plain vans in parking lots offer inexpensive sonographs to determine the sex of a fetus.

In North America
The United States ranked eleventh for infants under 1 year killed, and fourth for those killed from 1 through 14 years (the latter case not necessarily involving filicide). In the U.S. over six hundred children were killed by their parents in 1983. In Canada 114 cases of child-murder by a parent were reported during 1964-1968. Some of the cases that made news were those of Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, Genene Jones, Marybeth Tinning, Melissa Drexler, Waneta Hoyt (and in the UK Amelia Dyer).

Child Euthanasia
Unlike the sort of infanticide perpetrated by very disturbed people, in some cases child euthanasia is considered humane. Joseph Fletcher, founder of situational ethics and a euthanasia proponent, proposed that infanticide be permitted in cases of severe birth defects. He suggested that it is a logical and acceptable extension of abortion.

The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, euthanasia remains technically illegal for patients under the age of 12. However, Eduard Verhagen has documented several cases of infant euthanasia. Together with colleagues and prosecutors, he has developed a protocol to be followed in those cases. Prosecutors will refrain from pressing charges if this "Groningen protocol" is followed.

The United Kingdom
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched an enquiry in 2006 into critical care in foetal and neonatal medicine, looking at the ethical, social and legal issues which may arise when making decisions surrounding treating extremely premature babies.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, in its submission, recommended that a public debate be started around the options of "non-resuscitation, withdrawal of treatment decisions, the best interests test and active euthanasia" for "the sickest of newborns". The College stated that there should be discussion over whether "deliberate intervention" to cause death in severely disabled newborn babies should be legalised; it stated that while it was not necessarily in favour of the move, it felt the issues should be debated. The College stated in this submission that having these options would save some families from years of emotional and financial suffering; it might also reduce the number of late abortions, "as some parents would be more confident about continuing a pregnancy and taking a risk on outcome". In response to this proposal, Pieter Sauer, a senior paediatrician in the Netherlands, argued that British neonatologists already perform "mercy killings" and should be allowed to do so openly.

The Church of England submission to the enquiry supported the view that doctors should be given the right to withhold treatment from seriously disabled newborn babies in exceptional circumstances, and the Christian Medical Fellowship stated that when treatment would be "a burden" this was not euthanasia.

Explanations for the practice
Diverse and often contradictory explanations have been proposed to account for infanticide.

Economic
Many historians believe the reason to be primarily economic, with more children born than the family is prepared to support. In societies that are patrilineal and patrilocal, the family may choose to allow more sons to live and kill some daughters, as the former will support their birth family until they die, whereas the latter will leave economically and geographically to join their husband's family, possibly only after the payment of a burdensome dowry price. Thus the decision to bring up a boy is more economically rewarding to the parents. However, this does not explain why infanticide would occur equally among rich and poor, nor why it would be as frequent during decadent periods of the Roman Empire as during earlier, more affluent, periods.

Population control
Marvin Harris estimated that among Paleolithic hunters 23-50% of newborn children were murdered. He argued that the goal was to preserve the 0.001% population growth of that time. He also wrote that female infanticide may be a form of population control. Population control is achieved not only by limiting the number of potential mothers; increased fighting among men for access to relatively scarce wives would also lead to a decline in population. For example, on the Melanesian island of Tikopia infanticide was used to keep a stable population in line with its resource base. Although additional research by Marvin Harris and William Divale supports this argument, it has been criticized as an example of environmental determinism.

Customs and taboos
In 1888, Lieut. F. Elton reported that Ugi beach people in the Solomon Islands killed their infants at birth by burying them, and women were also said to practice abortion. They reported that it was too much trouble to raise a child, and instead preferred to buy one from the bush people.

Psychological
A minority of academics subscribe to an alternate school of thought, considering the practice as "early infanticidal childrearing". They attribute parental infanticidal wishes to massive psychopathological projection of the mother's unconscious onto the child, because of ancestral abuse by the mother's own parents.

Wider effects
In addition to debates over the morality of infanticide itself, there is some debate over the effects of infanticide on surviving children, and the effects of childrearing in societies that also sanction infanticide. Some argue that the practice of infanticide in any widespread form causes enormous psychological damage in children. Conversely, studying societies that practice infanticide Géza Róheim reported that even infanticidal mothers in New Guinea, who ate a child, did not affect the personality development of the surviving children; that "these are good mothers who eat their own children". Harris and Divale's work on the relationship between female infanticide and warfare suggests that there are, however, extensive negative effects.

Psychiatric
Postpartum depression has also been signaled as a causative factor of infanticide. Stanley Hopwood wrote that childbirth and lactation entail severe stress on the female sex, and that under certain circumstances attempts at infanticide and suicide are common. A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry revealed that 44% of filicidal fathers had a diagnosis of psychosis.

Genetic
Larry S. Milner, author of Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life, a treatise on infanticide, writes in his concluding chapter:

"So with this strata of support, I have concluded that it is a normal — a 'natural'— trait for a human being to be willing to kill his or her own child, especially during the first year of life, and that there are genetic factors which are determinative of this compulsion."

Sex selection
In a sexist culture that prefers males over females, sex selection may be one of the contributing factors of infanticide. In the absence of sex-selective abortion, sex-selective infanticide can be deduced from very skewed birth statistics. The biologically normal sex ratio for humans is approximately 105 males per 100 females; normal ratios hardly ranging beyond 102-108. When a society has an infant male to female ratio which is significantly higher than the biological norm, sex selection can usually be inferred.

"100 million missing women"
The idea of there being "100 million missing women", largely in Asia, originated with or was popularised by an influential 1990 essay by Amartya Sen. This gender gap may indeed be partly explained by female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. However, recent statistical evidence gathered by Emily Oster suggests that outbreaks of hepatitis B, which causes female fetuses to miscarry at a higher rate than male fetuses, may account for a large proportion, perhaps up to half, of the "missing" women.

In other animals


Although human infanticide has been widely studied, the practice has been observed in many other species of the animal kingdom since it was first seriously studied by Yukimaru Sugiyama. These include from microscopic rotifers and insects, to fish, amphibians, birds and mammals. Infanticide can be practiced by both males and females.