INFANTICIDE

Although the term is sometimes used to denote the willful killing of children of any age, infanticide usually refers to the newborn; infanticide occurs mostly soon after birth. There are broadly speaking two kinds of infanticide. The first is practiced as a method of family formation; the second occurs mostly outside of marriage, to avoid the shame of illegitimate births.

Infanticide as Tool of Family Formation

In Greek and Roman antiquity, the decision to kill a child was a prerogative of the family head. Evidence about its practice is largely anecdotal, often in the form of narratives about famous men who were abandoned at birth and saved from death, such as Oedipus or Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. Typical grounds for killing a child, such as physical impairment or the unwanted sex of the child, could only be recognized after delivery. Infanticide by exposure was practiced in Sparta for eugenic reasons, and was approved for similar reasons by Aristotle. It is speculated that female infanticide was practiced widely in antiquity, although statistical evidence in the form of imbalance of the sex ratio is ambiguous. Historian John Boswell, in his study published in 1988, hypothesized that child abandonment in antiquity was a benign form of population control, allowing people who did not welcome the arrival of a child to entrust it to "the kindness of strangers" desirous of adopting it. The inference is questionable, since most children could not survive without access to human milk, and the availability of a nurse at the time a child was found could not be taken for granted, even though mythical stories often involve the intervention of animals such as goats or she-wolves.

Christian and Jewish influences were largely responsible for the condemnation of deliberately caused infant death in the West, but infanticide was widely practiced in ancient Asian societies, and its importance is attested by historical studies on Tokugawa Japan and imperial China, and by testimonies on nineteenth-century India. Female infanticide dominated, particularly among the poor, and was justified by the fact that daughters would contribute little to their family of origin, while sons were responsible for the care of parents in old age and for performing familial rites. Neglect, harsh treatment, and preferential male feeding led to the higher mortality of girl babies, and might be considered a form of infanticide.

Infanticide to Conceal a Birth

The second type of infanticide, practiced by unmarried mothers right after delivery in order to avoid shame, prevailed in Western countries and is still encountered in the early twenty-first century. In the past, concealing a pregnancy and killing or abandoning the infant was the most readily available method of "birth control" for unmarried women. However, its effect on population numbers must have been small. In most countries of Europe, legal codes dating back to the Middle Ages prescribed punishment by death for women convicted of infanticide, but in practice the penalty was typically less severe. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the authorities of several countries passed legislation designed to regulate the unruly poor and impose strict norms of morality. In England, for example, a serious attempt was made to control extramarital relations and deter bastardy as a way of avoiding a potential burden on local finances. In Germany, unmarried mothers were mostly seduced maidservants, who were banished from the community.

Concealing the pregnancy and the birth was a desperate reaction. Royal edicts in France and England created a presumption of infanticide, punishable by death, when an unreported extra-marital pregnancy resulted in miscarriage or death of the infant. By the eighteenth century the severity of the penalty seemed to deter juries from convicting a woman whose child had died. In most countries, there was a relaxation of attitudes, and systems aiming at the protection of infants rather than at the punishment of mothers were set in place.

Foundling Hospitals

The first foundling hospitals were created in Italy as early as the thirteenth century. Some were eventually created in France too, and "tours" (revolving doors where a child could be abandoned without any questions asked) were installed in churches and hospitals. It is sometimes assumed that the extraordinarily high mortality rate of children in foundling hospitals amounted to the institutionalization of infanticide, but it is a more plausible explanation that the institutions failed in their mission because of the technical difficulty of keeping children alive without reliable access to a supply of maternal breast milk. Abandonments grew in numbers together with the institutions designed to cope with the practice. Paris in the late eighteenth century, with a population of half a million, admitted more than 7,000 foundlings a year, but at least a third of those came from out of town. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many large Western cities had institutions for foundlings recording sizable populations (there were between three and four thousand foundlings per year in New York in the 1870s) and a mortality well over 50 percent of admissions was common.

The Italian system in the early nineteenth century was characterized by a multiplicity of "tours" even in rural churches, and foundling homes with very high mortality. Unmarried mothers would nurse children other than their own before they were reintegrated in their communities, where the birth would have been kept secret. Men rarely assumed responsibility for their illegitimate offspring. In English-speaking countries, however, the responsibility for the care of illegitimate children was to the extent possible shifted to the mother and father of the child.

Demographic Effects

The demographic impact of infanticide was probably small. Some writers have suggested that it constituted an important check on population growth, but this is based on assumptions rather than recorded facts, in an area that is notoriously difficult to investigate and document. Actual condemnations for infanticide remained infrequent in all periods, and were mainly restricted to extra-marital relations. The controversy concerning the quantitative importance of infanticide hinges on the frequency of the practice among married couples. There it took the form of neglect, making it difficult to distinguish from high mortality from poverty and natural causes. The church and civil authorities expressed concern about overlaying (the accidental smothering of infants sleeping with their parents) and other accidental deaths, but it may well be that they were implicitly accusing poor parents of responsibility for deaths that in the twenty-first century would be blamed on unidentified causes, such as the sudden infant death syndrome. There is little evidence of differential female mortality in this context.

INFANTICIDE

Infanticide as Tool of Family Formation

Infanticide to Conceal a Birth

Foundling Hospitals

Demographic Effects

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