"Better Ten Graves Than One Extra Birth"

"...infanticide was not practiced only in Rome, as demonstrated in part by the legend of Romulus and Remus, or in Greece, but in the entire ancient world.


The bioethicist and animal rights supporter Peter Singer forcefully upholds the idea that this ancient practice should be rediscovered today, together with legal abortion. In fact, if it is true that only Christians forcefully rejected it – Singer argues – why should we believe that they alone were right, while all the other peoples and religions of the past were wrong?


'Killing unwanted infants or allowing them to die has been a normal practice in most societies throughout human history and prehistory. We find it, for example, in ancient Greece, where disabled infants were exposed on the mountainside. We find it in nomadic tribes like the Kung of the Kalahari Desert, whose women will kill a baby born while an older child is still too young to walk. Infanticide was also common on Polynesian islands like Tikopia, where food supplies and population were kept in balance by smothering unwanted newborn infants. In Japan before westernisation, ‘mabiki’ – a word that has its origins in the thinning of rice seedlings so that there is room for each plant to flourish, but which came to be applied to infanticide too – was very widely practiced, not only by peasants with limited amounts of land, but also by those who were quite well off.'


With the spread of Christianity over much of the world, abortion and infanticide became much more rare and isolated phenomena, while legislation, beginning with Constantine, intervened in defense of infants, and works of charity and assistance were developed for abandoned children and for families in difficulty. Up until the return of abortion in communist and Nazi legislation in the twentieth century, and of infanticide with the new law on euthanasia for children up to the age of twelve, in Holland."

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