Infanticide is not unique to humans. It is practiced by many mammals including some primates. The main difference between human and animal infanticide is that infanticide in humans is performed by the parent(s) of the child while in the case of animals it is usually a male suitor (Caldwell and Caldwell, 2005, p. 208). In pre-modern societies infanticide was done instead of abortions as it allowed for sexual selection, it was much more effective than pre-modern contraception, and it did not require any special skills or esoteric knowledge (Caldwell and Caldwell,2005, p. 205). Infanticide has a history as a method of population control. It is more frequent to throw away girl babies. This may be because of dowries or other cultural reasons. Infanticide seems to occur primarily when it aids one parent, both parents or additional children to survive better or if when the infant has little chance of survival.
Infanticide is a way to alter the reproductive stream before the child has the status of a real person, which is culturally defined (source). The deaths of weak, illegitimate, excess, deformed and unwanted infants are not defined as murder when the infants have not yet been born into the social world. Infanticide occurs cross-culturally for a multitude of causes. The reasons for infanticide can be summed up into three categories: biological (including the health of the child and twin stigmas), economical (relation to other children, women's workload, and available resources) and cultural (preferred gender, illegitimate children). This essay will examine cross-culturally the biological, economic and cultural factors for infanticide.
Biological reasons for infanticide are prevalent especially in countries that lack full medical or...
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Infanticide (the killing of infants of the same species but of no relation) can be observed across the animal kingdom from lions to birds, but primates have been observed to practice this phenomenon more than any other order. It has been observed in several species ranging from chimps to macaques, but it appears that a large proportion of infanticides have one thing in common; they are followed by a mating of the aggressor with the widowed mother. Some of the observations make use of game theory, and explain these actions in terms of risks and rewards. It is my hypothesis that this leads to a greater fitness and reproductive success for males who commit infanticide over those who don’t.
In 1942 the German government created a law that “banned all birth…rendering abortions compulsory” which meant that they were targeting the Jewish women demographic. As described in Saidel’s book Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women in the Holocaust, “pregnancy was a death sentence…as women discovered to be pregnant were automatically sent to the gas chambers” which meant that women and sometimes doctors in the camps would perform abortions in order to save the mother as they believed that the lives of the children could not feasibly be saved. In the cases of pregnancy in concentration camps, Saidel appropriately calls the experience “childdeath” instead of childbirth” because many times the mothers would be forced to have abortions or would perform abortions on themselves in order to escape the frequent deaths of pregnant women. If these pregnancies came to term, it would often have irreparable consequences. It would often result in the direct murder of both the mother and the child, as they would kill them together in gas chambers, but also there were reports of “women who gave birth were forced to witness their infants being smothered or drowned” which was yet another psychological and physical torment on women. Women’s experiences of pregnancy and abortion in camps is something that is often excluded from the
The birth of a child is usually a wonderful and priceless occasion. However, on June 5, 2015, an eleven-year-old girl gave birth to a newborn girl. Approximately a year before she gave birth, her 40-year-old father repeatedly sexually assaulted her. In this case, the unprepared eleven-year-old child decided to have the baby. This is a prime example that illustrates that the right to abortion should always be vested in the woman. Abortion, which has been debated for centuries and will continue to be fought upon for centuries to come, is a hot issue among social, political, and religious entities. This research paper will inform the reader about abortion using scholarly journals to define abortion, specifically when a fetus becomes a human being,
" Journal of Gender Studies 19.1 (2010): 73-86. Academic Search Premier. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
Infanticide is associated with aiding the death of an infant and infant euthanasia. Jim Holt, contributing author for the New York Times, writes that, “Infanticide is the deliberate killing of newborns with the consent of the parents and society. This concept has been common throughout most of history. In some cultures it served as a form of birth control when food supplies were limited. In others, it was a way of getting rid of malformed offspring. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all condemned infanticide as murder holding that only God has the right to take innocent human life. Consequently, the practice has long been outlawed in every Western nation.” (Euthanasia).
In 1998 NCANDS (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System) calculated the Fatalities by Maltreatment, Child Abuse...
Abortion is an immoral act of killing and there are other much more logical moral ways to handle unwanted pregnancies. This paper full of information is to show the crewel harsh side of abortion so people can know that there is more to the act than the convenience makes it look like. The baby doesn’t just disappear, the baby dies. Please refer to this to inform others, many people have no idea and this paper will help them
Abortion is defined as the premature expulsion of a fetus so that it does not live. Abortions can happen as a result of natural occurrences, but the interest of this paper is abortion that is induced. Abortion has been the topic of heated debates in many places. Nicole Miller went through an abortion at the age of 18, now 20 and is attempting to talk about the experance that it put her through. The government has had long difficult battles over the aspects of abortion. Legal cases have set benchmarks that are somewhat vulnerable. The church has had to analyze doctrines to decide whether abortion is right or wrong. There has also been violence in the way of abortion clinic bombings, assassinations, and political protest.
Unlike the previous cases of dehumanization in the history mentioned, unborn children are mainly dehumanized in today’s society by the lack of understanding of vocabulary, whereas the majority in previous time periods intentionally and strategically used their diction to prove that they are superior. A word involving human development often misinterpreted by society is fetus. Webster’s New Compact Desk Dictionary and Style Guide defines fetus as, “the unborn of young of an animal, esp. in its later stages and specif., in humans, from about the eighth week after conception” (Webster’s Dictionary 2002 180). People often misinterpret fetus as meaning a “clump of cells” a part of a woman’s body, although biologically once a person is conceived
As one knows, some unwanted pregnancies could often be harmful and distressing for a woman. Women should have the right over their body to choose to sustain the fetus or not. In the past decades, women did not have their freedom of abortion in many countries of the world. There have always been controversies going on about abortion. Each individual has dissimilar views on the legality of abortion. Some people are against abortion for personal religious purposes and beliefs. For those who don’t believe in abortion, it is because they see it as killing a fetus, which is a human being. Others support abortion because they believe in women’s rights. Laws of abortion vary in each country, and abortion is not legal all over the world. It is illegal under any conditions but only permitted to save woman’s life if in countries such as Brazil, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, and Ireland. However, abortion is legal without any restrictions in countries like Canada, Albania, and Italy. It the past decades Abortion was considered as criminal act in Canada. “If an abortion was carried out without such approval, the woman was liable for imprisonment for 2 years, an...
By removing men, it assumes that women who have given birth are more likely to have a ‘disturbance of the mind’. It becomes socially preferable to assume that infanticide is due to a mental instability rather than giving women agency and noting that killing a child is seen as a choice due to societal pressures such as shame. Thus, the exclusion of men reflects that female hysteria is alive and embedded in Infanticide Acts (Motz, 2010, as cited in Friedman, Cavney & Resnick, 2012). Feminists criticise that provisions on Infanticide actually pathologise childbirth and hence women, as by excluding men from the provision, though it does provide a more lenient sentence, it denies women the same level of agency that is credited to men (Friedman & Resnick,
With this as evidence there is a direct contrary against the flawed logic of Simone De Beauvoir in the idea that forced motherhood leads to “miserable children in the world. Motherhood is a complex narrative and cannot be defined in simple terms as that of Simone De Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, which aims to alienate the role of motherhood to being determined by the father and a woman’s connection to the father. There is another example in the case study of Odeth Kantengwa, who observed the effects of women “deciding to carry out motherhood responsibilities despite having been raped and impregnated by their rapists. (24)” This case study implied the difference of maternal realities between women of choice and women who were in forced in one way or another.
According to the UNICEF report in just 2006, studies disclosed that 10 million young girls were killed either before they were born or promptly after by their parents in the year of 1986 (which is not that long ago if you put that number into perspective). But why would anyone want to deliberately kill an innocent soul, let alone their own child? Female Infanticide and Gendercide is defined as the conscious killing of female, newborn babies which can happen from getting killed by their own blood or by an abortion. Even though acts as these are illegal, we still see this is a persistent problem today mainly in the cultures of China and India.