Infanticide

In sociology and biology, infanticide is the practice of intentionally causing the death of an infant of a given species by members of the same species. Many past societies permitted certain forms of infanticide, whereas most modern societies consider the practice immoral and illegal. Nonetheless, it still takes place in the Western world (usually because of the parent's mental illness or violent behavior) and in some poor countries because of tacit societal acceptance.

In the UK, the Infanticide Act defines infanticide as a specific crime committed by the mother only during the first twelve months of her infant's life. This article deals with the broader notion of infanticide explained above.

Infanticide in history

Infanticide was common in most literate ancient cultures, including those of ancient Greece, Rome, India, China, and Japan. The practice of infanticide has taken many forms such as the child sacrifice to supernatural figures or forces allegedly practiced in ancient Carthage. However, many societies regarded child sacrifice as morally repugnant and did not consider infanticide a religious or spiritual act. 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 now, are particularly vulnerable — see sex-selective infanticide.

Ancient Jewish practice condemned infanticide; Josephus wrote, "The Law orders all the offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the fetus." In Book 5 of his Histories, Tacitus wrote of how "all their other customs, which are at once perverse and disgusting, owe their strength to their very badness" and included among them: "It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant."

One frequent method of infanticide in antiquity was simply to abandon the infant, leaving it to die by exposure or whatever other fate befell it, commonly acknowledged to be slavery and prostitution. Another method commonly used with female children was to severely malnourish them, resulting in a vastly increased risk of death by accident or disease. Some cultures may have openly accepted this practice, whereas others may have practiced infanticide privately with the passive acceptance of society.

In some periods of Roman history, parents traditionally brought their newborn 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 the pater familias to put to death a child with visible deformities. Although infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in AD 374, offenders were rarely - if ever - prosecuted. Roman texts describe the practice of smearing the breast with opium residue so that a nursing baby would die with no outward cause.

From its earliest days, Christianity rejected the notion of infanticide. The Didache prescribed, "You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born." So widely accepted was this teaching that Justin Martyr, in his First Apology, defended the practice of not exposing children: "But as for us, we have been taught that to expose newly-born children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest we should do any one an injury, and lest we should sin against God, first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution." He continued with the observation: "And again [we fear to expose children], lest some of them be not picked up, but die, and we become murderers" which reflects the difficulty of determining how many exposed children actually died.

The condemnation of infanticide spread with Christianity; Njal's Saga, the account of how Christianity came to Iceland, concludes with the simultaneous proscription of pagan worship and exposure of infants (as well as eating horsemeat).

Several species other than homo sapiens commit infanticide, particularly fish and reptiles. One perhaps surprising mammalian example is the bottlenose dolphin, which has been reported to kill its young through impact injuries.

Explanations for the practice

Many historians attribute infanticide primarily to economic factors, especially a family's inability to support a certain number of children. In times of famine or cases of extreme poverty, parents may have to choose which of their children will live and which will starve. 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.

A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C.E., describes the casual nature with which Roman society often viewed infanticide: "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."

Some anthropologists have suggested other causes for infanticide in non-State and non-industrialized societies. Janet Siskind has argued that female infanticide may be a form of population control in Amazonian societies 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. Although additional research by Marvin Harris and William Divale supports this argument, it has been criticized as an example of environmental determinism. In the Solomon Islands, some people reportedly kill their first-born child as a matter of custom. They then adopt a child from another island, a practice suggesting that the causes of infanticide are more complex.

Other anthropologists have suggested a variety of largely culture-specific reasons for infanticide. In cultures where different value is placed on male and female children, sex-selective infanticide may be practiced simply to increase the proportion of children of the preferred sex, usually male. In cultures where childbearing is strongly tied to social structures, infants born outside of those structures (illegitimate children, children of incest, children of cross-caste relationships, and so forth) may be killed by family members to conceal or atone for the violation of taboo.

A minority of academics subscribe to an alternate school of thought blaming the practice, both modern and historical, on psychological inability to raise children (see early infanticidal childrearing). Contemporary data suggests that modern infanticide is usually brought about by a combination of postpartum depression and a psychological unreadiness to raise children. It could also be exacerbated by schizophrenia. In some cases, unwed and underage parents practice infanticide to conceal their sexual relations and/or avoid the responsibility of childrearing.

Sex-selective abortion and infanticide

Sex-selective abortion is the practice of aborting a fetus after determining (usually by ultrasound but also rarely by amniocentesis or another procedure) that the fetus is an undesired sex. Sex-selective infanticide is the practice of infanticide against an infant of an undesired sex. Sex-selective abandonment is the practice of giving an infant of an undesired sex up for adoption.

Family sex selection is most common in societies where a large dowry must be payed on marriage. In these societies, families favor males, as they do not have to pay a dowry on marriage. Some hunter gatherers also practice female infanticide, as males have a higher death rate than females. Parents may wish for a male child because, in many cultures, only a male will carry on the family name (when a bride gets married, she effectively becomes a member of the groom's family).

Sex-selective abortion was rare before the late 20th century because of the difficulty of determining the sex of the fetus before birth, but the advent of ultrasound has made it much easier. However, prior to this, parents would alter family sex composition through infanticide. Sex-selective abortion is believed to be responsible for at least part of the skewed birth statistics in favor of males in mainland China, India, Taiwan, and South Korea. Although the practice is often illegal, laws against it are extremely difficult to enforce because there is often no practical way to determine the parents' true motivation for seeking an abortion. This also makes the issue a difficult one to study since people almost always keep such information as private as possible.

Prevalence

There are 100 million missing women in the world, partly due to infanticide. China and India have the highest rates of missing women because of sex-selective infanticide and abortion. Parents sometimes kill their daughters because of the semmingly low rewards of raising them. The dowry price, which can be up to 10 times what an average family in India makes a year, can leave a family in debt. In such cases, women or girls will no longer be able to support their parents once they marry. On the other hand, a boy will support his family until he dies, making bringing up a boy much more lucrative.

China

Population pressures throughout certain periods of Chinese history such as the Qing dynasty contributed to sex-selective infanticide, but the practice appears to occur infrequently in China today. However, sex-selective abortion and abandonment likely contribute to the strong imbalance in sex ratios, especially in efforts to circumvent China's one child policy.

Chinese tradition says that most parents want their first child to be male, thus making female deselection common. Many Chinese parents desire sons in order to ensure familial propagation, security for the elderly, labor provision, and performance of ancestral rites. China calls the female deselection situation the "missing girl" problem.

In response to sex-selective abortions, Mainland China has made it illegal for a physician to reveal the sex of a fetus, but female infanticide lingers in China as a result of this law. Sex-selective abandonment, which is also prevalent in China, often serves as an alternative to self-selective abortion. About 95 percent of children in Chinese orphanages are able-bodied girls with living biological parents. Many abandoned Chinese girls have been adopted by westerners and brought to the United States or Canada, while others have been adopted domestically by childless Chinese couples.

India

Sociologists attribute the popularity of female deselection in India primarily to socioeconomic factors. Some people in India consider female children inherently less worthy because they leave home and family upon marriage. The high number of "dowry deaths," in which brides are murdered by their grooms' family members or commit suicide after suffering abuse and neglect, also plays a major role in gender preference.

Studies in India have indicated three factors of female deselection: economic utility, sociocultural utility, and religious functions. With respect to economic utility, studies indicate that sons are more likely than daughters to provide family farm labor, provide in or for a family business, earn wages, and give old-age support for parents. Upon marriage, a son makes a daughter-in-law an addition and asset to the family as she provides additional assistance in household work and brings an economic reward through dowry payments. On the converse, daughters get married off and merit an economic penalty through dowry charges. The sociocultural utility factor of female deselection in India resembles that in China. In India's patrilineal and patriarchal system of families, having at least one son is mandatory in order to continue the familial line, and a family with many sons garners additional. Finally, Hindu tradition holds that only sons are allowed to provide, therefore justifying the religious function of female deselection. According to Hindu tradition, sons are mandatory because they kindle the funeral pyre of their late parents and assist in the soul salvation.

It is currently illegal to determine the sex of a child during pregnanacy using ultra-sound scans. Laboratories are prohibited to reveal the fetus's sex during such scans. While most established labs comply with the law, determined persons can find a cheaper lab that would tell them what they want. Like the Chinese, the Indians also use the postnatal alternative, which is sex-selective infanticide. Some turn to people called Dais, traditional midwives, historically female, who offer female deselection, letting the baby boys live and killing the baby girls by turning them upside-down, snapping their spinal cords, and then declaring them stillborn.

Other causes of sex ratio imbalances

Sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and abandonment may not be the only causes of sex ratio imbalances. Work by Emily Oster notes that women infected with the hepatitis B virus are more likely to bear males than uninfected women. Her 2005 publication in The Journal of Political Economy suggests that in the past, the prevalence of hepatitis infection may have accounted for 75% of the sex ratio imbalance in China, 20% to 50% of the imbalance in the Middle East and Egypt but less than 20% of the imbalance in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. As an active area of research, these findings are controversial. Today's concentrations of sex ratio imbalances are regional - in North-West India or East China - and demographic - among women whose first child was a girl - and do not correspond at all to known epidemiological features.

Consequences and ethical debates

Consistent with his general ethical theory, Peter Singer, an Australian humanist and philosopher, holds that the right to physical integrity is grounded in a being's ability to suffer, and the right to life is grounded in, among other things, the ability to plan and anticipate one's future. Since the unborn, infants and severely disabled people lack the latter (but not the former) ability, he states that abortion, painless infanticide and euthanasia can be justified in certain special circumstances, for instance in the case of severely disabled infants whose life would cause suffering both to themselves and to their parents.

Singer classifies euthanasia as voluntary, involuntary, or non-voluntary. (For possible similar historical definitions of euthanasia see Karl Binding, Alfred Hoche and Werner Catel.) Given his consequentialist approach, the difference between active and passive euthanasia is not morally significant, for the required act/omission doctrine is untenable; killing and letting die are on a moral par when their consequences are the same. Voluntary euthanasia, undertaken with the consent of the subject, is supported by the autonomy of persons and their freedom to waive their rights, especially against a legal background such as the guidelines developed by the courts in the Netherlands. Non-voluntary euthanasia at the beginning or end of life's journey, when the capacity to reason about what is at stake is undeveloped or lost, is justified when swift and painless killing is the only alternative to suffering for the subject.

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. Some anthropologists studying societies that practice infanticide, however, have reported on the affection and love such parents display toward to their children. (Harris and Divale's work on the relationship between female infanticide and warfare suggests that there are, however, extensive negative effects).

Joseph Fletcher, founder of situational ethics and a euthanasia proponent, proposed that infanticide be permitted in cases of severe birth defects. He and philosopher Peter Singer have suggested that it is a logical extension of abortion.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia remains technically illegal for patients under the age of 12. However, Dr. 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.

Sex-selective abortion and infanticide may make it more difficult for the larger-population gender of that generation to seek heterosexual romantic relationships. It is estimated that by 2020 there could be more than 35 million young 'surplus males' in China and 25 million in India, all of whom will be unable to find girlfriends or wives, assuming that they seek one.

External links

• A conference held in Singapore in December 2005 on female deficit in Asia
• Sex Selection at Birth; Statistics Singapore Newsletter, Vol 17 No.3 January 1995
• The Invisible Girl
• MSNBC - No Girls Please - In parts of Asia, sexism is ingrained and gender selection often means murder
• Akhilesh Mithal - Itihaas - Is Female Feticide Civilized?
• It's a Girl! - Waiting to Die: The Babies Sacrificed for China's One Child Policy
• Surplus Males and US/China Relations
• A Dangerous Surplus of Sons? - An analysis of various studies of the lopsided sex ratios in Asian countries
• Case study: Female Infanticide in India and China
• Working paper by Emily Oster linking sex ratio imbalances to hepatitis B infection
• S2 China Report - China: The Effects of the One Child Policy
• Notification on Addressing in a Comprehensive Way the Issue of Rising Sex Ratio at Birth a UNESCAP document
• An overview of ancient attitudes in the Roman Empire towards the death of children and infanticide
• Journal of Population Research: Shortage of girls in China today
• Gendercide watch - Female Infanticide
• Catholic Encyclopedia on Infanticide

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