INFANTICIDE

Infanticide is the practice of intentionally killing human newborns. Because the term infant descends from a Latin word that means not speaking, infanticide should be distinguished from feticide, or abortion, intentionally killing fetuses, on the one hand, and felicide, intentionally killing children who are mature enough to speak, particularly one's own, on the other.

Infanticide has been practiced all over the world throughout the whole of human history. Newborns who have not yet learned to talk have been intentionally killed because they were thought to be:

1. terminally ill;
2. experiencing unbearable pain or suffering;
3. born with unacceptable anomalies;
4. of the wrong gender, race, class, maternity, or paternity;
5. political threats;
6. economic threats;
7. fitting sacrifices in religious rituals; and
8. embarrassing, frustrating, or inconvenient.

The single most common reason for the practice of infanticide in the past and present has been the desire to be rid of female newborns. The histories of infanticide and gender bias are interwoven. Not to study them together is to overlook their interdependence.

Human newborns, particularly females, have been intentionally killed in many ways. They have been incinerated, decapitated, and suffocated. They have also been sundered, stabbed, stoned, shot, hung, drowned, struck, shaken, stomped, crushed, raped, poisoned, buried, starved, fed to animals, and exposed to the elements. They have been denied air, food, water, warmth, and protection from diseases. Their blood vessels have been injected with toxic substances and bubbles of air. It is impossible to understand the history of infanticide without taking into account its diverse and often cruel methods.

In many societies infanticide was not only tolerated but also sometimes promoted as a solution to the problem of unwanted infants, whether deformed or healthy. This entry provides a historical account of infanticide in Western societies, beginning with its practice in Graeco-Roman antiquity and concluding with modern evidence.

Infanticide in Antiquity

In Greek society, an infant's worth was measured by its potential to fulfill a useful function in society. Thus Plato, in his Republic, maintained that society was better served if deformed newborns were "hidden away, in some appropriate manner that must be kept secret," a practice that likely included infanticide (460). Similarly Aristotle wrote in Politics: "As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." Aristotle also condoned abandonment as a method of population control, although he recommended early abortion in regions where the "regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed" (1335b). In Sparta, where military strength was highly valued, infanticide may have reached its zenith. In Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch gives an account of the Spartan custom: "But if it was ill born and deformed they sent it to … a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Taygetus, in the conviction that the life of that which nature had not well-equipped at the very beginning for health and strength, was of no advantage, either to itself or to the state" (16).

It is difficult to distinguish between infanticide, with the intent to kill the infant, and abandonment, which may or may not have involved this intention. Failure to distinguish between the two has made accurate assessment of each difficult (Boswell). Historians have generally interpreted the Greek word for abandonment, translated as "exposure, putting out, or hiding away," as equivalent to infanticide. However, the Greek terms for abandonment do not convey the sense of injury or harm associated with infanticide. Historical evidence is not clear as to whether abandoned infants usually died or if those who abandoned them intended their death. Often abandonment was viewed as an alternative to infanticide. Nevertheless it is reasonable to infer that some deformed and healthy infants, particularly females, were exposed with the intent that they would not survive. Further it is likely that direct infanticide was practiced for both eugenic purposes and population control. Laws neither prohibited the killing of defective infants nor protected healthy infants from death by exposure.

Evidence from classical sources suggests that infanticide was practiced widely and with impunity in Roman society. While Romans continued the practice of disposing of defective infants for eugenic and economic reasons, an additional motivation stemmed from the Roman belief in the phenomenon of unnatural events, or prodigia (Amundsen). The Greeks saw deformities in newborns as natural occurrences. In contrast the Romans viewed portentosi, meaning unnatural or monstrous births, as ominous or numinous signs that needed to be destroyed in order to rid the community of guilt and fear. The historian Livy of the first century b.c.e. wrote, in Histories, about the birth of an infant who was both unusually large and of indeterminate gender:

[M]en were troubled again by the report that at Frusino there had been born a child as large as a four year old, and not so much a wonder for size as because … it was uncertain whether male or female. In fact the soothsayers summoned from Etruria said it was a terrible and loathsome portent; it must be removed from Roman territory, far away from contact with earth, and drowned in the sea. They put it alive into a chest, carried it out to sea and threw it overboard. (37.27)

Roman literature is rife with testimony to such killings. According to the Laws of the Twelve Tables (fifth century b.c.e., considered to be the basis of Roman law), deformed children, puer ad deformitatem, were to be killed quickly. Historians disagree whether the law required that these infants be killed or whether it merely allowed infanticide. In any case Roman society appears to have accepted infanticide as a reasonable solution to the problem of deformed infants both for eugenic and superstitious motives. In a gynecological treatise entitled "How to Recognize a Newborn Worth Rearing," the Graeco-Roman physician Soranus (first–second century c.e.) specifies that such an infant "immediately cries with proper vigor, is perfect in all its parts, members and senses [and] has been born at the due time, best at the end of nine months. And by conditions contrary to those mentioned, the infant not worth rearing is recognized" (Gynecology, p. 79–80).

In his Moral Essays, Seneca argued that the practice of infanticide is rationally motivated: "Mad dogs we knock on the head; the fierce and savage ox we slay; sickly sheep we put to the knife to keep them from infecting the flock; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal. Yet it is not anger, but reason that separates the harmful from the sound" (1.15). Even if it were not legally mandated, it is unlikely infanticide was penalized in Roman society given the tradition of patria potestas, which granted fathers absolute authority over other members of the family. Roman fathers had power of life and death over their children and were allowed to execute even a grown son (Boswell). The most likely victims, however, were infants, especially deformed ones and female children who—even when healthy—were considered of little social value.

Some Roman philosophers objected to abandonment and infanticide. Musonius Rufus, writing in the first century c.e., opposed infanticide because it reduced the population. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher and a contemporary of Musonius, condemned abandonment as a violation of the natural affection that parents should have for their offspring. Such apparent concern for the infant was not based on a belief in the child's intrinsic right to life, but was motivated by the desires to follow natural law and to increase the population. Thus, although evidence for the practice of infanticide under the Roman empire is somewhat inconclusive, Roman law and custom apparently did not prohibit parents from killing their children.

Early Jewish and Christian Traditions

The people of ancient Israel were acquainted with infanticide, particularly as it was practiced in the religious rituals of their neighbors. As evidenced by the frequency and vigor with which infanticide was denounced by their leaders, it appears that some Israelites were attracted to it. The ancient story of Abraham's apparent willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, who was not an infant but a young man, only to be instructed by a heavenly messenger to kill a ram instead, was told and retold over the centuries (Genesis 22). Among other things, the recitation of this story reiterated a preference for animal sacrifices in Israel's religious rituals, at least until the some of Israel's prophets condemned that practice too.

Jewish scholars were thus among the first to clearly condemn the killing of infants. Jews believed that humans were created in the image of their creator, Yahweh. Hence all human life was sacred from the moment of birth. The Torah speaks of defective individuals as Yahweh's creations and it mandates protection to the blind, the deaf, the weak, and others who are needy (Leviticus 19:14). Human life had intrinsic value by virtue of divine endowment, not merely instrumental value by virtue of social utility, as in classical Greek and Roman society.

The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo denounced infanticide and emphasized adults's duties toward children. His account equated abandonment with infanticide:

Some [parents] do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight. Others take them to be exposed in some desert place, hoping, they themselves say, that they may be saved, but leaving them in actual truth to suffer the most distressing fate. For all the beasts that feed in human flesh visit the spot and feast unhindered on the infants, a fine banquet provided by their sole guardians, those who above all others should keep them safe, their fathers and mothers.

Philo further condemned the practice, in Works, by claiming, "Infanticide undoubtedly is murder, since the displeasure of the law is not concerned with ages but with a breach to the human race" (Vol. 7).

However, it was the advent of Christianity, rooted in Judaism, that significantly altered public attitudes toward the practice of infanticide. Christians inherited the Jewish doctrine that humans were divinely created, including the emphasis on the sanctity of all human life. They also recalled with horror the New Testament report that King Herod had slaughtered many infants in his attempts to exterminate the infant Jesus (Matthew 2). Believers were urged to emulate Christ's self-sacrificing love through benevolence and charity, providing a new rationale for philanthropy (Ferngren, 1987a). The consequences of this philanthropy were seen in Christian charities and endeavors for the poor, the sick, and the needy. Rescue and care of exposed infants was viewed as a special Christian duty. During the medieval period through the nineteenth century, Christians established foundling hospitals, and institutions for abandoned and unwanted children.

Two other Christian concepts important for their effect on the practice of infanticide were original sin and its correlative ritual of infant baptism, thought to have become common during the third century. Christians believed that infants who died without baptism were condemned to eternal hell. Because baptisms were performed only on holy days, not necessarily soon after birth, many parents already were committed to raising the child by the time of the ritual. Thus baptism served as an important deterrent to both abandonment and infanticide.

Although Jews and Christians vigorously opposed infanticide, their opposition had little impact until Christianity became widespread and officially recognized in the fourth century. A church council in Spain issued the first canon against infanticide in 305 c.e., and soon after, both local and ecumenical councils throughout Europe took similar actions. The penalty prescribed by the church for infanticide was either penance or excommunication.

The first secular law concerning the killing of children was issued in 318 c.e. by Constantine, the first Christian emperor. However, the law mentions children killing parents as well as parents killing children and thus was not directed specifically against infanticide. In 374 c.e. Valentinian enacted legislation declaring infanticide to be murder and punishable by law. Soon after a statute was issued that appears to have prohibited exposure of infants. Although Christian emperors promulgated many laws reflecting Christian morality, fear of losing salvation made the penitential system of the churches far more effective in influencing moral behavior than did state legislation. Church leaders continued to put pressure on the state, bringing about a series of legal codes aimed at protecting newborn children.

Although the laws did not distinguish between healthy and defective infants, one may assume that Christian condemnation of infanticide extended to all infants. Early Christian apologists reflect this position. In City of God, Saint Augustine (354–430) argued that differences between healthy and deformed people should be seen in the same light as racial and ethnic diversity:

If whole peoples have been monsters, we must explain the phenomenon as we explain the individual monsters who are born among us. God is the Creator of all; He knows best where and when and what is, or was, best for Him to create, since He deliberately fashioned the beauty of the whole out of both the similarity and dis-similarity of its parts.… It would be impossible to list all the human offspring who have been very different from the parents from whom they were certainly born. Still all these monsters undeniably owe their origin to Adam. (16.8)

Augustine's writings show a concern for children unusual in his time, placing the infant and the child under the protection of the Lord.

Despite decisive changes in attitudes and laws, infanticide persisted even after the official triumph of Christianity as the imperial religion. While the practice may have diminished, episodic killing of infants continued throughout Western history. What changed in subsequent periods were the motivations, methods, and penalties associated with infanticide as well as the options available to parents of unwanted children.

Medieval Period

Christianity's beliefs mixed with pagan myth, superstition, and folklore during Europe's medieval period. This commingling had significant implications for deformed infants and the practice of infanticide. Some thought, for example, that parental sexual behavior or ill-timed passions generated abnormal births or that sexual relations during menstruation, pregnancy, or lactation resulted in dire consequences for the unborn. In addition the birth of an anomalous infant was sometimes attributed to demonic intervention: Such births were seen as the product of either a sexual liaison between the mother/witch and the devil or a changeling left by the devil as punishment for parental sins. Parents, particularly mothers, were held morally responsible for their infants's abnormalities.

The changeling myth, derived from pagan sources, maintained that fairies, motivated by jealousy, substituted an elf child for the real child (Haffter). This version did not impute guilt to the parents; instead, blame was placed on demon fairies of the underworld and their envy of humans. Once the myth was Christianized, however, it became the devil who stole the real child and left a demon-child in its place. Thus God allowed parents to be punished for impiety or for bearing children outside matrimony. This change transformed the rationalization for the birth of defective infants from external forces to parental responsibility. Brutal and frequently lethal methods were employed either to exorcise the devil from the child or to compel the devil to return the normal child. Few infants survived the ordeal. However violent infanticide of this sort was probably the exception rather than the rule, even during the Middle Ages.

There was some secular legislation against infanticide, particularly in the later medieval period, and the crime was usually considered to be homicide. But overlaying (suffocation in the parental bed), the most frequent cause of infanticide, was easy to conceal and intent was nearly impossible to establish, thus making prosecution extremely difficult. When cases of infanticide did reach secular courts, the accused were readily acquitted on pleas of insanity or poverty. Secular authorities displayed remarkable ambivalence toward the killing of infants. By law it was considered a serious crime, yet in practice it was generally excused (Damme).

Throughout most of the medieval period, infanticide was regulated largely by church courts rather than civil courts. Ecclesiastical penalties for married women convicted of infanticide were also remarkably light, considering the Church's position. Punishment involved penance and was comparable to that imposed for sexual offenses such as adultery and fornication. Once the penance had been performed, the guilty person was not prosecuted in civil courts. The relatively light penance and the failure of secular authorities to prosecute cases of infanticide suggests that the crime was considered something less than homicide (Helmholz). Cases involving unwed mothers, however, were treated differently. Unmarried mothers who killed their infants were often accused of being witches. In fact, infanticide was the most common charge brought against witches during the Middle Ages. Unlike their married counterparts, alleged witches were punished severely, usually by drowning, burial alive, or impalement.

The only reference to the status of infants under medieval secular laws was a civil law definition of a freeman (in the law "Of Different Kinds of Children"), which appears to have excluded both illegitimate and seriously deformed infants from what little protection the law offered: "Among freemen there may not be reckoned those who are born of unlawful intercourse … nor those who are created pervertedly, against the way of human kind, as for example, if a woman bring forth a monster or a prodigy" (Fleta 1.5). As legal historian Catherine Damme comments, "Clearly, these pitiful non-persons were vulnerable to the murderous attacks of their progenitors" (p. 7).

Although direct infanticide was practiced to some extent, the more common and insidious cause of infant death during the Middle Ages was abandonment. The distinction between infanticide and abandonment became increasingly important because abandonment was generally regarded as a venial offense, punishable only if the child died. In the early-Middle Ages, abandonment was widespread, motivated primarily by poverty and illegitimacy. Although a few churchmen believed it was equivalent to infanticide, two forms of abandonment were virtually institutionalized: oblation (or donating infants to the Church) and leaving infants at foundling hospitals. From a Christian point of view, both were improvements over the morally objectionable practices of exposure and infanticide. A canonical decree of the tenth century urged women to leave their illegitimate infants at the church rather than kill them (Boswell). Although oblates were tied irrevocably to the Church for life, the Church provided food, clothing, and a secure monastic life.

Foundling homes were established to diminish the practice of exposure and to provide a humane solution to infanticide. In reality, however, the foundling home often was equivalent to consigning the child to death through neglect, disease, and sometimes more direct action. Once infants arrived at a foundling home, they frequently were sent to the country with a wet nurse who was likely to be negligent and more interested in a steady flow of babies than in nurturing. Death rates were high, especially for female infants (Trexler). Markedly high demographic ratios of males to females throughout Europe during this period suggest that selective female infanticide may have been widely practiced. The disparity between male and female deaths was probably due to greater social value for males and a greater likelihood that, when put into foundling homes, they would be reclaimed by their parents. Thus such institutions did little to secure the lives of unwanted infants. They were successful only in transferring the problem of unwanted infants from a public arena to an institutional one, shielding society from the realities of abandoned children and possibly encouraging the very practice they were intended to alleviate.

Renaissance and Reformation

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a concerted effort to stem the practice of infanticide throughout Europe. Despite a dramatic surge in reported cases, it is not clear whether or not the increase meant more frequent practice; urbanization undoubtedly made it more difficult to destroy infants secretly. Authorities were more successful at promulgating harsh legislation aimed at ending the practice and were also increasingly vigilant in prosecuting murdering mothers. An intense focus on the problems of poverty and sexual promiscuity and their purported ties to infanticide led to laws that were strongly moral in tone and selective against unmarried mothers.

The first attempt to strengthen and unify infanticide laws under the Holy Roman Empire was a statute known as the Carolina, issued in 1532 by Emperor Charles V. The law decreed that those found guilty were to be buried alive, or impaled, or drowned. The law also made concealment of pregnancy a crime, as it was presumed that such secrecy indicated infanticidal intentions. Many judges, under the pretext of the Carolina, "engaged in a policy of terror," the most notorious being the Saxon jurist Benedict Carpozof, who claimed that he assisted in the executions of 20,000 women (Piers, p. 69). The Carolina was only the first in a series of laws over the next few centuries that dealt severely with alleged infanticidal mothers.

In England Henry VIII's split from the Roman Catholic church resulted in increased secular control. Growing concern about sexual immorality and criminality among the swelling numbers of urban poor led to the enactment of several social control laws. The Poor Law of 1576 (18 Eliz. I, c.3) made bearing bastard children a crime. The fact that punishment was severe and involved substantial social dis-grace for the mother increased the incentive for these women to commit infanticide. It is not surprising, therefore, that English criminal court records show that the number of indictments and guilty verdicts for infanticide rose dramatically after 1576. Most cases involved bastard children, and concealment of pregnancy was mentioned frequently (Hoffer and Hull).

The reasons for the increased zeal in punishing illegitimacy are somewhat obscure, but Puritan interests seem to have played a role. The 1623 Jacobean infanticide statute (21 Jac. I, c.27), influenced by the Puritan element in parliament, allowed courts to convict on the basis of circumstantial evidence of concealment and prior sexual misconduct. The law presumed that the child was born alive and then killed unless the mother could prove otherwise. Prosecutions of infanticide showed a fourfold increase immediately following its enactment (Hoffer and Hull).

Ideas about the role of witches in the death of infants, even the deaths of children in foundling hospitals, persisted. Infanticide and witchcraft were so strongly interrelated during this period that their rates of indictments rose and fell in parallel. Witchcraft continued to play a major part in the drama of infanticide until the early 1800s.

Foundling hospitals continued to remove unwanted and abandoned children from public view throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As in earlier centuries, the fate of these children was precarious. Overcrowded conditions, disease, lack of enough wet nurses, and general neglect continued to claim the lives of many of the institutions's charges.

The overwhelming majority of the victims of infanticide during this period were children born out of wedlock. Demographic information does not show the strong gender bias seen in the medieval years, nor is there evidence that defective newborns were consistently selected out. Apparently the shame associated with immoral sexual behavior was the primary selective force associated with the killing of infants.

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In the eighteenth century, a steep decline occurred in indictments for infanticide; the courts showed greater leniency toward those accused of killing their children. In addition illegitimacy was more common; as a result the stigma associated with it lessened and its strong correlation to infanticide began to diminish. Attitudes toward parenting changed as well, with a new emphasis on the emotional nurturing of children. Wet-nursing lost popularity, and it became more common for children to spend their early months with their mothers. The greater value placed on children resulted in increased beneficence in child rearing, and so parents were probably less likely to kill their offspring. In any case juries were less willing to convict parents of infanticide solely on the basis of concealment.

New defenses for the suspected infanticidal mother were developed and more readily accepted by juries. One of the first of these defenses, known as benefit of linen, was based on evidence that the mother had made linen for the baby before its birth and therefore had no intention to kill it. This line of argument became very popular after 1700 and virtually guaranteed acquittal. Another major defense commonly used was the want of help plea. Various accidents and calamities, such as failure to tie the umbilical cord, falls of either the mother or baby, illness of the mother, and unheeded cries for help, all effectively helped to sway jurors.

Efforts to reform the English infanticide statute of 1624 began in 1773 but were not successful until 1803. In the ambivalence of eighteenth-century English society, infanticide was considered homicide yet somehow not quite the equivalent of killing an adult. Despite the failure of reform resolutions until the nineteenth century, juries tended to ignore the severe infanticide law aimed selectively at unwed mothers.

A similar trend occurred in Prussia during the reign of Frederick the Great. In his Dissertation sur les raisons d'établir ou d'abroger les lois (1756), Frederick argued that the prevalence of infanticide was due to the harsh penalties for illegitimacy. He therefore abolished laws penalizing pregnancies out of wedlock and eventually provided legal protection for unwed mothers. Scholars throughout Europe, including Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, also called for legal reform and urged authorities to prevent the circumstances leading to infanticide.

Despite moderately successful reform efforts, however, infanticide did not disappear. During the nineteenth century high rates of illegitimate births continued; so, consequently, did infant killing. Corpses of infants found in privies, parks, rivers, and other public places fueled the perception that infanticide was reaching intolerable proportions. This perception may or may not have represented an actual increase in the incidence of the crime, but it did serve to stimulate an unprecedented public outcry. By the mid-nineteenth century, the concern over the slaughter of innocents appeared in the press (Behlmer). The British newspaper Morning Star (June 23, 1863) declared, "This crime is positively becoming a national institution"; and the Pall Mall Gazette (April 30, 1866) protested, "It is exceedingly unpleasant to find ourselves stigmatized in foreign newspapers … as a nation of infanticides.… 13,000 children are yearly murdered by their mothers in heretical England." The Saturday Review (1865, p. 161–162) asserted that infanticide "is the characteristic at once of the rudest barbarism and of that more terrible epoch of national life when the wheel has gone its full circle, and society falls to pieces by the vices of civilization."

Physicians were among those who led reform efforts. In his essay on infanticide in 1862, William Burke Ryan wrote passionately against the horrors of infant murder; he and several colleagues formed the Infant Life Protection Society. By 1870 the group had achieved many of its goals, including mandatory registration of all births. In 1872 Parliament passed the first Infant Life Protection Act requiring registration of all baby farms, houses with more than one child under the age of one.

Legal prosecution of infanticide also underwent significant changes. Ellenborough's Act of 1803, which replaced the Infanticide Act of 1623, reinstated the common-law presumption of stillbirth, shifting the burden of proof from the defendant (mother) back to the prosecutor. In 1828 the law was expanded to include legitimate as well as illegitimate births, removing the obvious selection against unwed mothers. The fact that courts consistently acquitted the accused or mitigated penalties on the basis of insanity is testimony to the court's continued hesitancy to consider infanticide the moral equivalent of murder. There was a "visceral feeling that such a crime simply could not be a rational act.… [t]he minds of the jury and jurist could not accept that such a heinous act could be committed by a rational person—the accused's mind had to be deranged, if only temporarily" (Damme, p. 14).

Twentieth Century

The most notorious instances of infanticide in the twentieth century were committed secretly in Nazi Germany, under the auspices of the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness. Doctors, nurses, and teachers were required to register all children with congenital abnormalities or mental retardation. Failure to comply meant civil penalties or imprisonment. Defective children were removed from their homes and routinely euthanized at hospitals by morphine injection, gas, lethal poisons, or sometimes starvation. To ensure secrecy, the bodies were cremated immediately. Parents who protected their children were sent to labor camps and their children were taken from them. Documents reveal substantial public support for the euthanasia of defective children, even from parents with abnormal children (Proctor).

Calls for legalized euthanasia also arose from the United States, where it was justified primarily as a way of limiting the social costs associated with defective infants. W. A. Gould, writing in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, cited the "elimination of the unfit" in ancient Sparta as a defense of the economic arguments for euthanasia in the twentieth century (Gould). In 1938 W. G. Lennox advocated the "privilege of death for the congenitally mindless and for the incurable sick who wish to die" because saving these lives "adds a load to the back of society" (Lennox, p. 454). But as the realities of the Nazi extermination programs began to surface in the United States in the 1940s, promotion of euthanasia in general began to decline.

Yet in 1942, Foster Kennedy, professor of neurology at Cornell Medical College, wrote an article entitled "The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective" advocating "euthanasia for those hopeless ones who should never have been born—Nature's mistakes." Kennedy believed "we have too many feebleminded people among us," and it was most humane to relieve defective individuals of their tortured and useless existence (Foster). Furthermore, he maintained that in diagnosis and prognosis there could be no mistakes in this category of children. A Gallup poll conducted twelve years earlier indicated that Kennedy's position probably was not without support within the American community. According to the poll, 45 percent of Americans in 1930 favored euthanasia of anomalous infants (Proctor, p. 180).

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the possibility of killing newborns with anencephaly in the course of acquiring transplantable organs from them was debated in professional circles. Babies with this condition are born without cerebral hemispheres, with an open skull that is empty except for the top of the spinal cord. They are wholly and permanently unconscious. Some viewed the possibility of acquiring rare transplantable organs from such infants as a way to squeeze something of value out of a tragic set of circumstances. This option was restricted by the convergence of two widely accepted norms, however. The first was that vital organs must be acquired only from dead donors. The second was that death must mean either the irreversible loss of spontaneous circulation and respiration or the irreversible loss of the functioning of the whole brain, including the brain stem. Several attempts at Loma Linda University in Southern California to acquire transplantable organs from babies born with anencephaly within the constraints of these two norms established that either the dead donor rule or the usual definition of death must first be changed. Several years later, The Council on Judicial and Ethical Opinions of the American Medical Association (AMA) proposed that in cases of anencephaly the requirement that donors of vital organs must be dead be relaxed. Shortly thereafter it withdrew this proposal in deference to intensely negative reactions. Some believed that the Council had put the wrong foot forward while attempting to move in a helpful direction. They thought that when babies are born with anencephaly it would have been less controversial to allow parents to opt for a higher brain rather than a whole-brain definition of death. If this change had been made, babies born with accurately confirmed cases of the anomaly would have been declared legally dead before transplantable organs were acquired from them. Some held that this would have honored the important ethical conviction that no one of any age or condition should be killed merely to provide transplantable organs for someone else.

The practice of infanticide was debated in the popular culture of the United States and elsewhere when Peter Singer of Australia joined the faculty of Princeton University one year before the end of the twentieth century. An accomplished utilitarian moral philosopher who was well known beyond academic circles for his advocacy of animal liberation, Singer troubled many. He contended that in general it is ethically permissible to treat human newborns in ways that parallel the ways we are morally permitted to treat other animals with approximately the same traits and abilities. He held that it is ethically acceptable to kill infants born with some serious anomalies. He also suggested that there is a sense in which parents are free to kill a handicapped infant and rear a healthier one instead. His point was that in infancy the value or interests of one newborn can often be interchanged with those of another with little or no overall loss of value, and sometimes with a gain.

These issues proved difficult to resolve in academic and popular settings in the last part of the twentieth century. This was partly because, even in many of the most widely used English dictionaries, the ability to distinguish between the basic meanings of possible and potential had all but vanished. The claim that a human infant is a potential embodiment of value, interests, or rights weighty enough to protect him or her from death at the sheer discretion of others was typically understood to mean that for a newborn this eventual state is merely possible. Common although it was, this understanding of potential failed to capture and convey the senses of inner power, capacity, and endowment in its root meaning, as was still sensed in related terms like potent, potentiate, and potentate. Wider recognition of the differences in basic meaning between potential and possible would not have settled the debates about infanticide in the last part of the twentieth century; however, it would have enabled these exchanges to proceed with greater precision and plausibility.

Conclusion

Authors who have explored the ethical dimensions of infanticide have frequently prefaced their discussions with surveys of its practice throughout history. The ostensible purpose of these discussions generally has been to provide a broader, less culturally bound perspective. However, Stephen Post argues that many writers selectively present "a one-sided and reductionist view of the history of infanticide to support their position … that active killing of neonates is morally acceptable" (Post, p. 14). He contends that the extent of infanticide has been misrepresented and overstated. The argument is that commentators on the history of infanticide have drawn, at least to some extent, from historical surveys plagued by interpretations that tend to view history in a positivist or linear fashion. The French historian Phillipe Ariès maintains that the idea of a separate childhood was unknown until the later Middle Ages (Ariès). Similarly Lloyd DeMause contends: "The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused" (DeMause, p. 1).

Revisionist historians, focusing on social, economic, and cultural forces, offer a significantly altered perspective on infanticide. While infanticide has been practiced continuously throughout Western history, it is not obvious that filicidal tendencies are widespread among parents. On the contrary, parents have usually resorted to infanticide only in exceptional circumstances. Although accurate estimates of the frequency of infanticide are almost nonexistent (largely due to inadequate and inconsistent record keeping), the prevalence of infanticide throughout Western history seems to have been episodic. Rates of infant killing have shown a tendency to rise and fall depending on prevailing economic and social forces. There have been striking discrepancies between the official position of the law, the frequency of the crime, the rate of prosecutions, the severity of punishment, and public sentiment concerning infanticide. Although the law has been relatively consistent in prohibiting its practice, the law has not always been an accurate gauge of societal values. Finally the availability of alternatives to infanticide— including abandonment, foundling hospitals, oblation, contraception, and abortion—appears to have had more impact on its practice than have official prohibitions.

cindy bouillon-jensen (1995)

revised by david r. larson

SEE ALSO: Abortion: Contemporary Ethical and Legal Aspects; Abuse, Interpersonal: Child Abuse; Children; Family and Family Medicine; Harm; Holocaust; Homicide; Human Rights; Infants; Insanity and the Insanity Defense; Maternal-Fetal Relationship; Mentally Disabled and Mentally Ill Persons; Moral Status; Natural Law; Sexism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amundsen, Darrel W. 1987. "Medicine and the Birth of Defective Children: Approaches of the Ancient World." In Euthanasia and the Newborn: Conflicts Regarding Saving Lives, ed. Richard C. McMillan; H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.; and Stuart F. Spicker. Boston: D. Reidel.

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