Infanticide has always been with us. Many other horrible things have as well.
However, there is a connection between abortion and infanticide. If you read the literature you will see that, where contraception and abortion are disallowed or made difficult, both abortion AND infanticide INCREASE. So making the practice of abortion a sensible and serious matter between a woman and her doctor seems like a reasonable plan right across the board, doesn't it?
encyclopedia.com
If infanticide served as a means of limiting family size, as many anthropologists believe, then the introduction of contraceptives, abortion, and other methods of population control may have rendered it obsolete.
cbctrust.com
At present almost two-thirds of the world’s women reside in countries where abortion may be obtained on request or for a broad range of social, economic or personal reasons.26 Liberalization has been successful; countries which have developed access to safe, legal abortion have typically lowered the rates of pregnancy-related complications and death as well as infanticide, and improved the health of women and their families.27,28,29
britannica.com
In modern societies the regulation of population with contraceptives or through abortion has tended to greatly reduce the frequency of infanticide.
In Victorian England, much infanticide was encouraged by the religious opprobrium that attached to illigitmacy, which was so severe that it virtually destroyed the life of the mother.
In biblical times, the killing of the first born male was quite common strictly for religious reasons. Later, in the Christian era, infanticide for other reasons was still common. One can give the Christians some credit in this regard in that they opposd the practice and helped to reduce it by taking in children left to die.
Contraceptives and the legalizing of abortion have reduced abortions, and of course have reduced the imcidence of infanticide. Abortion still runs extremely high, however, in catholic societies, where contraception and abortion are still approached from a religious perspective.
As the church begins to allow safe sex, one can expect the incidence of Aids, and other STD's to decrease, as well as abortions and infanticides. |
