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Subject: Alternatives, Other Places, Other Times
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Date: Sat, 7-Apr-84 16:15:32 EST
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Posted: Sat Apr  7 16:15:32 1984
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From The Americana 1984 Annual; "Social Welfare", page 452,  and
                                "Children", page 173 :


   "Welfare problems also mounted in Latin American countries.... Perhaps
the worst of the Western Hemisphere's urban problems, linked to unabated
population growth, was the estimated 40 million abandoned youngsters; ...
2 million homeless children in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil .... In Sao Paulo,
Brazil,...2.5 million."

[in the U.S.A.] "The number of reported cases of child abuse topped
950,000 in 1982 and threatened to hit the 1 million mark in 1983"


From Science 84, May 1984, "Infanticide", pages 26-31:

"But human infanticide is too widespread historically and geographically
to be explained away just as a pathology or the peculiarity of some
aberrant culture. ...In fact there is good evidence for infanticide in
100 hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies ..."
  "In 18th-century Europe, so many children were killed when their parents
rolled over them in bed - ostensibly by accident - that an Austrian
decree of 1784 forbade parents to take their children under 5 to bed with them.
...In France in 1833 more than 160,000 babies were given to foundling
hospitals, where most of them died in infancy."
   "Often babies are killed because they put too great a strain on a
family's limited resources. ...Australian Aborigines, for example, sometimes
kill babies born during droughts, while some South American Indian mothers
kill their ill-timed newborns because they take milk away from their older
babies who are still nursing. A number of cultures kill the second-born
of twins."
"The !Kung bushmen of the Kalihari Desert in Africa practice infanticide
as a way of spacing births."
 "Jesuite missionaries reported in the 17th century that the Chinese killed
infant daughters by the thousands. the British found female infanticide
rampant in India in the late 18th century."
"In the 17th and 18th centuries, death rates in colonial America for girls
aged one to nine were sometimes more than twice those for boys, and
similar patterns are seen in 18th century Europe."


  This is growing longer than I had intended so I won't quote from the
part of the article that discusses the similarly widespread practice
of infanticide among animals.  But please consider: if a practice is
so widespread among so many forms of life which either were created
by God or evloved over many millions of years, is it not possible
that this practice might answer some real need?



References for further reading:

Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives
   Werner-Gren Foundation, Aldine, NY, May 1984.

The Dark Side of Families
  ed. by David Finkelhov and Richard Gelles, Sage Publications,
    Beverly Hills, CA, 1983.