Infanticide (or infant homicide) is the intentional killing of infants or offspring. Infanticide was a widespread practice throughout human history that was mainly used to dispose of unwanted children, its main purpose being the prevention of resources being spent on weak or disabled offspring. Unwanted infants were usually abandoned to die of exposure, but in some societies they were deliberately killed. Infanticide is generally illegal, but in some places the practice is tolerated, or the prohibition is not strictly enforced.
Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Pre-Islamic Arabia, early modern Europe, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans.
Infanticide became forbidden in the Near East during the 1st millennium. Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban infanticide across the Roman Empire in the 4th century. The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whereas infanticide of female babies became more common during the One-Child Policy era (1979–2015). During the period of Company rule in India, the East India Company attempted to eliminate infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is very rare in industrialised countries but may persist elsewhere.
Parental infanticide researchers have found that mothers are more likely to commit infanticide.MARLENE L. DALLEY, Ph.D. The Killing of Canadian Children by Parent(s) or Guardian(s): Characteristics and Trends 1990–1993, January 1997 & 2000 In the special case of neonaticide (murder in the first 24 hours of life), mothers account for almost all the perpetrators. Fatherly cases of neonaticide are so rare that they are individually recorded.Neil S. Kaye M.D – Families, Murder, and Insanity: A Psychiatric Review of Paternal Neonaticide
History
The practice of infanticide has taken many forms over time. Child sacrifice to supernatural figures or forces, such as that believed to have been practiced in ancient Carthage, may be only the most notorious example in the ancient world.
A frequent method of infanticide in ancient Europe and Asia was simply to abandon the infant, leaving it to die by exposure (i.e., hypothermia, hunger, thirst, or animal attack).Justin Martyr, First Apology.
On at least one island in Oceania, infanticide was carried out until the 20th century by suffocating the infant,Diamond, Jared (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. . while in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in the Inca Empire it was carried out by sacrifice (see below).
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 projection or displacement of the parents' unconscious onto the child, because of intergenerational, ancestral abuse by their own parents. Clearly, an infanticidal parent may have multiple motivations, conflicts, emotions, and thoughts about their baby and their relationship with their baby, which are often colored both by their individual psychology, current relational context and attachment history, and, perhaps most saliently, their psychopathology Almeida, Merminod, and Schechter suggest that parents with fantasies, projections, and delusions involving infanticide need to be taken seriously and assessed carefully, whenever possible, by an interdisciplinary team that includes infant mental health specialists or mental health practitioners who have experience in working with parents, children, and families.
Paleolithic and Neolithic Many Neolithic groups routinely resorted to infanticide in order to control their numbers so that their lands could support them. Joseph Birdsell believed that infanticide rates in prehistoric times were between 15% and 50% of the total number of births, while Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15% to 20%. Both anthropologists believed that these high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. A book published in 1981 stated that comparative anthropologists estimated that 50% of female newborn babies may have been killed by their parents during the Paleolithic era. The anthropologist Raymond Dart has interpreted fractures on the skulls of hominid infants (e.g. the Taung Child) as due to deliberate killing followed by cannibalism, but such explanations are by now considered uncertain and possibly wrong. Children were not necessarily actively killed, but neglect and intentional malnourishment may also have occurred, as proposed by Vicente Lull as an explanation for an apparent surplus of men and the below average height of women in prehistoric Menorca.
In ancient history 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. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. 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. Child sacrifice was particularly widespread in ancient Carthage. Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.
Ancient Egypt In Egyptian households, at all social levels, children of both sexes were valued and there is no evidence of infanticide.Egypt and the Egyptians, Emily Teeter, p. 97, Cambridge University Press, 1999, The religion of the ancient Egyptians forbade infanticide and during the Greco-Roman period they rescued abandoned babies from manure heaps, a common method of infanticide by Greeks or Romans, and were allowed to either adopt them as foundling or raise them as slaves, often giving them names such as "copro -" to memorialize their rescue."Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon", Lawrence E. Stager, Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1991 Strabo considered it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child must be reared.Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals, William Graham Sumner, p. 318, org pub 1906, Cosmo 2007, Diodorus indicates infanticide was a punishable offence.Life in Ancient Egypt, Adolf Erman, Translated by H. M. Tirard, p. 141, org pub 1894, republished Kessinger 2003, Egypt was heavily dependent on the annual flooding of the Nile to irrigate the land and in years of low inundation, severe famine could occur with breakdowns in social order resulting, notably between and . Instances of cannibalism are recorded during these periods, but it is unknown if this happened during the pharaonic era of ancient Egypt.Ancient Egypt, David P. Silverman, p. 13, Oxford University Press US, 2003, Beatrix Midant-Reynes describes human sacrifice as having occurred at Abydos in the early dynastic period ( ),The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Ian Shaw, p. 54, Oxford University Press, 2002, while Jan Assmann asserts there is no clear evidence of human sacrifice ever happening in ancient Egypt.Of God and Gods, Jan Assmann, p. 32, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008,
Carthage
According to Shelby Brown, Carthaginians, descendants of the Phoenicians, sacrificed infants to their gods. Charred bones of hundreds of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. Skeptics suggest that the bodies of children found in Carthaginian and Phoenician cemeteries were merely the cremated remains of children who died naturally.Sergio Ribichini, "Beliefs and Religious Life" in Moscati, Sabatino (ed), The Phoenicians, 1988, p.141
Plutarch ( ) 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 Canaanites. Writing in the , 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 the practice of adult and child sacrifice barbarous, however, infant exposure was widely practiced in ancient Greece.Robert Garland, "Mother and child in the Greek world" History Today (March 1986), Vol. 36, pp 40-46Sarah B. Pomeroy, "Infanticide in Hellenistic Greece" in Images of women in antiquity (Wayne State Univ Press, 1983), pp 207-222.Richard Harrow Feen, "The historical dimensions of infanticide and abortion: the experience of classical Greece" The Linacre Quarterly, vol 51 Aug 1984, pp 248-254. It was advocated by Aristotle in the case of congenital deformity: "As to the exposure of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live."(Alternate translation: "let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared") Politics, Book VII, section 1335b
In Greece, the decision to expose a child was typically the father's, although in Sparta the decision was made by a group of elders.See Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. Exposure was the preferred method of disposal, as that act in itself was not considered to be murder; moreover, the exposed child technically had a chance of being rescued by the gods or any passersby.See (e.g.) Budin 2004, 122–23. This very situation was a recurring motif in Greek mythology.
The practice was prevalent in ancient Rome, as well. Philo was the first known philosopher to speak out against it. A letter from a Roman citizen to his sister, or a pregnant wife from her husband, dating from , demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
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 die by exposure.John Crossan, The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images, p. 151 (Castle, 1994, 1998) The Twelve Tables of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. The concurrent practices of slavery and infanticide contributed to the "background noise" of the crises during the Republic.
Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374, but offenders were rarely, if ever, prosecuted.
According to mythology, Romulus and Remus, twin infant sons of the war god Mars, survived near-infanticide after being tossed into the Tiber River. According to the myth, they were raised by wolves, and later founded the city of Rome.
Middle Ages