Infant damnation

“ This agony of an infant by strangulation with no possibility of relieving it, while neither science nor a mother’s love can loosen the invisible cord that is choking the baby throat—the little neck, generally as white as a lily and now as livid as a piece of dead flesh; the ebbing of a pure, blameless, loving, angelical life in the most tragical torments, with the convulsions of a strangled criminal and the misery of asphyxia, is one of the most appalling instances of the inexorable fate which, whether it be for trial or for punishment, oppresses humanity. ”

“ At the birth of a child, a special messenger was sent to notify relatives and intimate friends, who must soon visit the baby and take it presents, and especially so if it was the first in the family. Yet infanticide was not uncommon, for poverty sometimes decided against the infant, and this also might be true of a child born maimed or deformed. "In old days, when the new-born child was laid at the father's feet, the father could refuse to take it, and the child was then exposed to die in a bamboo-grove. ”

“ It is self-evident that your offending constituted extreme violence. It was brutal and beyond callous — your actions were inhuman. You deliberately killed a three-year-old infant by shooting him in the head as he clung to the leg of his father. The terror you inflicted in the last few minutes of that small child’s life is but one instance of the pitiless cruelty that you exhibited throughout. ”

“ In the law of England infanticide is murder or manslaughter according to the presence or absence of deliberation. The infant must be a human being in the legal sense; and “a child becomes a human being when it has completely proceeded in a living state from the body of its mother, whether it has breathed or not, and whether it has an independent circulation or not, and whether the navel-string is severed or not; and the killing of such a child is homicide when it dies after birth in consequence of injuries received before, during or after birth.” ”

“ Gives the infant cruel treatment,
Blinds its eyes and breaks its fingers;
And when evening shadows gather,
Kills the young child while it slumbers,
Throws its body to the waters,
Breaks and burns the infant's cradle. ”

“ Unfortunately in such cases it is rarely possible to punish the foster-parents, since in the case of infants it is so difficult to determine precisely where ignorance, stupidity, and poverty end and infanticide by deliberate neglect begins. The law rightly prescribes severe penalties for infanticide; but we may well ask whether it is worse for a mother to suffocate her child immediately after its birth, or, by the lack of proper care, to inflict upon the infant a more tedious but no less certain doom. We often hear it asserted that such murderous baby-farming is in Europe a thing of the past. ”

“ The Chinese are kind to their women and yet there is no country today where infanticide is more common. The oldest civilization in the world, the Babylonian, was not one in which women were10 ill-treated, yet all the indications are that infanticide was practised in the shape of human sacrifice.
The Rajputs of India pleaded for their privilege of destroying infant children when theirs had been the highest civilization in the world. ”

“ If such a monstrous philosophy as this presents any justification for such an act, then the killing of a newly-born infant, or of an idiot, may be likewise justified. The destruction of the life of an unborn human being, for the reason that it is small, feeble, and innocently helpless, rather aggravates than palliates the crime. Every act of this kind, with its justification, is obviously akin to that savage philosophy which accounts it a matter of no moment, or rather a duty, to destroy feeble infants, or old, helpless fathers and mothers." [39] ”

“ In this perplexity, and meaning nothing less than the murder of the infant, they are meditating different schemes for concealing the birth of the child; but are wavering between difficulties on all sides, putting the evil hour off, and [11] trusting too much to chance and fortune.—In that state often they are overtaken sooner than they expected; their schemes are frustrated; their distress of body and mind deprives them of all judgment, and rational conduct; they are delivered by themselves, wherever they happened to retire in their fright and confusion ”

“ Nor is it more probable that the midwife should take upon herself the commission of a concealed and voluntary murder of an innocent and helpless infant, for the sake of sparing those feelings in another, of which the supposition implies she could not possibly partake; and if she should be encouraged by the father, whose affections for an infant child may be more gradually unfolded than the mother's, to perpetrate so horrid an act, we must allow that to the evidence of unnatural and murtherous parents must be added that of hired ruffians ”

“ Much more enlightened care will, no doubt, be bestowed upon the welfare of the infant than is done at present. How many crimes are unwittingly committed against a child’s mentality by ignorant parents and nurses! Lies and prevarications and evasions are always reprehensible, but with children they are of fatal and life-long effect. ”

“ Why, I sprang forward, saying, ‘You horrid, dirty thing,’ and took my baby into my own arms. The poor miserable woman looked at me in the most pitiful manner, and then gathering up the corner of her blanket, she held it in her arms as one would hold a sick infant, and at the same time with a mournful cry, she made a sign that her baby had died ”

“ And yet, an infant is sometimes by an act of necessary cruelty destroyed when yet in the womb, when owing to an oblique presentation at birth delivery is made impossible and the child would cause the death of the mother unless it were doomed itself to die. ”

“ There are many societies for the protection of children; and human Governments are very severe upon violence to children. You see—er—if an infant is killed it is—er—disqualified for being subsequently slaughtered on the field of battle.
"Infanticide is regarded as a most heartless crime. You now perceive that that group of legislators are glaring at an adjacent island containing another nation, and are shrieking with anger and envy! That is because that insular nation has so many more babies, and increases so much more rapidly in population." ”

“ Nor can the infant claim any security from the mother who bore it, against some ruthless law, or practice, or superstition, that on frequent occasions consigns the female proportion, and sometimes both sexes, to destruction. On authentic testimony, bodies have been greedily devoured even in a state of obvious and loathsome disease; and a mother has been observed deliberately destroying her youngest child, [Pg 483] serving it up as food, and gathering around her the remainder of the family to enjoy the unnatural banquet. ”

“ Men waylaid women in the streets and snatched babies from their mothers' arms, and the literal physician recites at length the various dishes into which the murderous kidnappers converted their infant forage. ”

“ Turning to consider particularly the treatment of babies in various lands, by various peoples and tongues, we are compelled to note that even where infanticide or "exposure" is not practised, a similar result is worked out through the hardships—sometimes unconscious, sometimes designed—of infant life. ”

“ Connected with infanticide is another subject equally important, but of very difficult treatment; that is practices to destroy the infant before the birth. [364] In modern nations all such offences are theoretically visited with very severe punishment by the law, and public opinion so strongly condemns them that no one solicitous of upholding a respectable character in society will dare to be their apologist. ”

“ My mother's sufferings, and much personal unhappiness, had been, intensifying the feeling, and as I watched my baby in its agony, and felt so helpless to relieve, more than once the indignant cry broke from my lips: "How canst thou torture a baby so? What has she done that she should suffer so? Why dost thou not kill her at once, and let her be at peace?" More than once I cried aloud: "O God, take the child, but do not torment her." ”

“ The intimate relationship recognized as existing between the infant and its mother has been among many primitive peoples a frequent cause of infanticide, or has been held at least to excuse and justify that crime. Of the natives of Ashanti, Ellis says:—
"Should the mother die in childbirth, and the child itself be born alive, it is customary to bury it with the mother.... ”

“ If it were a weakly boy, and still more often, if it were a girl, no matter whether she were strong or weak, the infant was exposed to die by ravening beasts, or the inclemency of the climate. Many instances occur of children so exposed, who, saved by some kindly neighbour, and fostered beneath a stranger's roof, thus contracted ties reckoned still more binding than blood itself. ”

“ This anecdote illustrates the good effect of inculcating into the infant mind an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, which is too often a seed sown in the young heart, which goes on increasing daily with the growth of the child, until a fearful career of crime is ended by murder, and its necessary expiation on the scaffold. ”

“ Ante-natal child-murder alone can truly express the nature of the act. If no murderous hate is in the mother’s heart, why does she kill the child? If you saw a mother seeking to kill her child after it was born, knowing that she did it because its existence was hateful to her, and because she did not wish to bear the burden of its nursing and training, would you not conclude that her heart was filled with murder towards it? ”

“ Deaths of babies, once mysterious dispensations of Infinite power, have come to mean indictments of community and family for failure to furnish right conditions for infant life. Deaths of mothers in childbirth, leaving older children without suitable protection and care, once thought events to which to be resigned, however sad and pitiable, are now seen to be preventable calamities for which society is to blame. ”

“ To it the infanticide so common among the uncivilized and semi-civilized is, of course, mainly due—the burial of living infants with mothers who have died in childbirth; the putting to death one out of twins; the destruction of younger children when there are already several. For these acts there is an excuse like that commonly to be made for killing the sick and old. ”

“ Again, the unnatural practice of infanticide had to be grappled with. This was the practice of destroying female children. Our people gave them to understand that it was murder, and that a murderer should die, whether Native or European. ”

“ Infanticide is one of the most horrible of crimes, and its growth among a people is accompanied by as rapid a growth of vice of every other kind. In England where a foundling hospital could not be endured for a moment, the crime of infanticide is increasing every year, and the number of murdered children is already an army of martyrs. ”

“ Let the finger of scorn be pointed at every tight-laced woman, and let small waists be shunned, instead of courted, as wives and mothers. The practice is disgraceful, is immoral, is murderous: for it is gradual suicide, and almost certain infanticide. It is worse than infanticide; for, to entail a diseased body and mind upon offspring, in addition to causing their premature death, is a crime of the deepest dye man can commit.
Wherein consists the difference between sowing the seeds of disease that necessarily hasten death, and killing the child outright? ”

“ A MONSTROUS CRIME.—The abiding interest we feel in the preservation of the morals of our country, constrains us to raise our voice against the daily increasing practice of infanticide, especially before birth. The notoriety that monstrous crime has obtained of late, and the hecatombs of infants that are annually sacrificed to Moloch, to gratify an unlawful passion, are a sufficient justification for our alluding to a painful and delicate subject, which should "not even be named," only to correct and admonish the wrong-doers. ”

“ The punishment which our laws inflict upon those parents who murder their infants is well known, nor has its justice ever been contested; but, if they deserve death who destroy a child in its birth, what pain can be severe enough for her who forbears to destroy him only to inflict sharper miseries upon him; who prolongs his life only to make him miserable; and who exposes him, without care and without pity, to the malice of oppression, the caprices of chance, and the temptations of poverty; who rejoices to see him overwhelmed with calamities ”

“ Those who do this would not hesitate to kill them after they are born; for the state of mind that would justify and instigate ante-natal child-murder, would justify and instigate post-natal child-murder. Yet, public sentiment consigns the murderer of post-natal children to the dungeon or the gallows; while the murderers of ante-natal children are often allowed to pass in society as honest and honorable men and women.
The unwelcome child is ever before the mother. She regards it as a sacrilegious intruder into the domain of her life; an invader of the holy of holies of her being. ”

“ Law.—The crime of infanticide among civilized nations is still frequent. It is however due in most cases to abnormal causes, such as a sudden access of insanity, privation, unreasoning dislike to the child, &c. It is most closely connected with illegitimacy in the class of farm and domestic servants, the more common motive being the terror of the mother of incurring the disgrace with which society visits the more venial offence. Often, however, it is inspired by no better motive than the wish to escape the burden of the child’s support. ”