killing

killing Throughout the history of humankind, acts of killing have been used not only to regulate the lifespan, but also to place social value on particular kinds of bodies. While almost all civilizations have outlawed murder, certain forms of killing, like the murder of slaves and enemies, have been tolerated and indeed sanctioned by various societies at different historical moments.

Even before birth, the body may be killed through induced abortion and other types of feticide, such as stabbing the fetus in the womb. Although the abortion of nonviable fetuses is legal in most industrialized nations and is considered part of women's reproductive freedom, religious groups espousing fetal rights and the sacredness of human life contend that abortion is still murder. Shortly after birth, human life is also subject to termination through infanticide. Socially and legally reprehensible in many cultures today, infanticide was widely practised for eugenic purposes in ancient Greece and Rome, and, more recently, in Nazi Germany. In antiquity unhealthy, deformed, and sometimes normal, but female infants were abandoned or drowned, while in Nazi Germany defective infants were poisoned, gassed, or starved.

Over the course of the lifespan, an individual can become the victim of manifold other types of homicide (the killing of one human being by another). Acts of killing performed without malice, such as deaths resulting from drunk driving, or other accidents, are classified as manslaughter, whereas deaths stemming from intentional injuries are considered murder. To deter and punish deliberate homicides, many governments have instituted capital punishment, executing criminals who have transgressed the socially decreed boundaries of acceptable killing. Nonetheless, members of various groups have often enacted private or vigilante justice, in which they have created their own criteria and circumstances for killing. The history of homicide in the US, for example, contains numerous instances of vigilantism and group terrorism, ranging from outlaw justice on the antebellum frontier, to nineteenth-and early twentieth-century lynchings in the South, to present day inner-city gang warfare. More widespread and socially devastating than any form of vigilantism or individual homicide, however, is systematized, state-sanctioned warfare. With the shift away from politically and territorially based victories in the nineteenth century, modern warfare has made its chief objective the destruction of enemy bodies and resources. During the period of World War II, in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, the term genocide was introduced to describe the intentional, systematic slaughter of a racial or cultural group.

At the end of the lifespan, one way that the body may be killed or that natural death may be hastened is through euthanasia. Generally performed to avoid unnecessary or prolonged suffering, euthanasia can take the form of physician-assisted suicide, passive euthanasia, or active euthanasia (sometimes known as ‘mercy killing’). Like infanticide, euthanasia was practised in Greek and Roman antiquity as well as in Nazi Germany to end the lives of the chronically sick and those deemed ‘lives not worth living’.

Christina Jarvis

See also eugenics; euthanasia; genocide; murder; war and the body.