Practice of Infanticide

As history has shown, the definition of "defective" or "deformed" has varied from civilization to civilization. The ancient Greeks viewed an infant with any debilitating birth defect as a candidate for infanticide, while the Germans of 1940 termed a baby with a Jewish mother defective. Further, during economic hard times, excess infants were considered "defective," and other cultures considered female babies disposable.

Today's combination of economic security and modern medical technology has given the "civilized" world the luxury of seeking to protect the unwanted and the severely deformed from this process of natural selection. As a result, society faces a multitude of ethical and moral dilemmas regarding infanticide which directly and indirectly affect the core of human behavior.

The practice of infanticide has taken place throughout the ages and in all types of socie

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e dunghills of London and other large cities" (Harris, 1977, p. 183). Eventually, Parliament intervened and set up foundling hospitals with different systems for collecting unwanted infants without risk to the parent. "On the Continent, infants were passed through revolving boxes set in the walls of foundling hospitals" (Harris, 1977, p. 183). However, the government did not have the resources to rear the children to adulthood and nearly 80 percent died before adolescence. Most were turned over to "killing nurses" or "she-butchers" whose duty it was to destroy the foundlings. Only when the demand for child labor grew in the late-eighteenth century did infanticide slow down. The rise of modern day civilization has had a marked effect upon infanticide and how it is viewed and used. Cultural anthropologists are now able to step back and study this human social behavior in light of society's attitudes and values as well as from the perspective of primitive man. While history's economic and cultural impact on infanticide have been documented the study of these native societies untouched by the complex issues of today gives a glimpse into the true nature of human social behavior. However, it is a world that is rapidly vanishi
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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