The roots of human infanticide run deep and begin with poverty

[C C]

https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-infa...th-poverty

EXCERPT: If there’s one thing we can still agree on in this era of political polarisation, it is that the life of a child is sacred. A mass shooting, air strike or natural disaster in which children are killed is considered far worse than one that slaughters only adults. When the ethicist Peter Singer suggested that, in theory, a baby’s life might be less worthy of protection than an adult’s because its consciousness is less developed, there were irate calls for him to lose his job. There is – our culture assumes – no love so great as that of a parent for a child, and no crime so unequivocally evil as the murder of an innocent infant. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to suppose that this attitude is genetically determined. What could be a more basic evolutionary imperative than to protect one’s offspring from harm?

The only problem with this simple account is that for most of human history infanticide was a common and accepted method of family planning, and the perceived innocence of children was less likely to win them special care and more likely to make them seem like ideal sacrifices to a bloodthirsty god. Evidence suggests that, while extreme protectiveness of children is hard-wired in the human brain, it exists alongside a predilection for murdering them shortly after they are born....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-infa...th-poverty

[Syne]

Yeah, and we still have holdovers from those more barbaric times, in the form of the pro-choice crowd. They think it's an acceptable method of family planning too.

[Zinjanthropos]

Met a pregnant woman, not poor, a while ago who expressed to me her massive disappointment when she found out the baby is a girl. What kind of societal pressure could make a potential mother exhibit such behavior? I don't think she will toss the baby over a cliff when it's born but what a start for the child, having a mother who is probably going to be guilt ridden about this for the rest of her life. She's not from China if that's what everyone's thinking. Wonder just how many women feel so guilty about not giving birth to a boy that a baby girl ends up either abused or in the morgue?

[Secular Sanity]

The only problem with this simple account is that for most of human history infanticide was a common and accepted method of family planning, and the perceived innocence of children was less likely to win them special care and more likely to make them seem like ideal sacrifices to a bloodthirsty god. Evidence suggests that, while extreme protectiveness of children is hard-wired in the human brain, it exists alongside a predilection for murdering them shortly after they are born....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-infa...th-poverty

Do you remember the highly controversial article that Pinker wrote for the New York Times?

Why They Kill Their Newborns

[C C]

Do you remember the highly controversial article that Pinker wrote for the New York Times?

Why They Kill Their Newborns

Geez. Hard to believe the Susan Smith ruckus was a couple of years before even that.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm glad the Josef Fritzi headlines are still safely in 2008. I'd really feel freaked-out if that had been retconned to the '90s by ECCO.

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Met a pregnant woman, not poor, a while ago who expressed to me her massive disappointment when she found out the baby is a girl. What kind of societal pressure could make a potential mother exhibit such behavior? I don't think she will toss the baby over a cliff when it's born but what a start for the child, having a mother who is probably going to be guilt ridden about this for the rest of her life. She's not from China if that's what everyone's thinking. Wonder just how many women feel so guilty about not giving birth to a boy that a baby girl ends up either abused or in the morgue?

The daughters in India are sure jarring their fathers' traditional conviction that they needed sons to get ahead.

Asha belongs to the growing number of daughters of blue collar workers who are now the main support of their families, helping them move to a better house, buy fancier TVs and, sometimes, even jewellery for their mothers. As Birbal Chaurasia, who runs a panshop in New Delhi, says of his two daughters who have good white collar jobs: "Betiyon ne baap ko chaand pe pahuchaya. (My daughters took me to the moon)."

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life...650657.cms

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[Secular Sanity]

On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm glad the Josef Fritzi headlines are still safely in 2008. I'd really feel freaked-out if that had been retconned to the '90s by ECCO.

Wow, that is friggin creepy.

Never heard of the Fritzl case before. That is way worse than that movie Room.

You know, when I googled his name a twitter account popped up. Do you think there’s any way that prisoners in Austria have internet access?

And that John Lilly guy was good friends with Timothy Leary, Albert Hofmann, and that NAMBLA freak Ginsberg.

[RainbowUnicorn]

Met a pregnant woman, not poor, a while ago who expressed to me her massive disappointment when she found out the baby is a girl. What kind of societal pressure could make a potential mother exhibit such behavior? I don't think she will toss the baby over a cliff when it's born but what a start for the child, having a mother who is probably going to be guilt ridden about this for the rest of her life. She's not from China if that's what everyone's thinking. Wonder just how many women feel so guilty about not giving birth to a boy that a baby girl ends up either abused or in the morgue?

keep in mind there is many countries where religion is very heavy and prominant, yet the parents sell their own children into slavery.

the top end of civilised western culture with all its medical science is thousands of years ahead of many social cultures.
even many cultures inside those same western countrys are at least hundreds of years behind intellectually, espousing medieval religous dogma.

look at the usa denying free contraception to teenagers.
while also denying free pregnancy services to teenagers.

its like watcing some mediaval puppet show shooting each other with laser guns.

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... and im not even touching on the secret baby graveyards
giving away a baby to some slave trader work shop...

poverty was lamented by poets and manipulated by rich.

there is very little to no actual historical records of what happened to the countless unwanted babys born from teenager women being raped by rich older men as was the custom.

soo, as you can imagine. it looks like someone trying to paint over a bloody massacre for personal satisfaction or political propoganda.


The customer.. back then, was to move the teenage girl who had become pregnant (from rape would be the normal thing)
assuming they were not sold off to child marriage as was the custom at about 14 years old...

at this point it feels like im trying to have a discussion about rocket science with small children who are watching Tv.

meanwhile the US alt-right are trying to bring this type of culture back and normalise it

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https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-infa...th-poverty

EXCERPT: If there’s one thing we can still agree on in this era of political polarisation, it is that the life of a child is sacred. A mass shooting, air strike or natural disaster in which children are killed is considered far worse than one that slaughters only adults. When the ethicist Peter Singer suggested that, in theory, a baby’s life might be less worthy of protection than an adult’s because its consciousness is less developed, there were irate calls for him to lose his job. There is – our culture assumes – no love so great as that of a parent for a child, and no crime so unequivocally evil as the murder of an innocent infant. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to suppose that this attitude is genetically determined. What could be a more basic evolutionary imperative than to protect one’s offspring from harm?

The only problem with this simple account is that for most of human history infanticide was a common and accepted method of family planning, and the perceived innocence of children was less likely to win them special care and more likely to make them seem like ideal sacrifices to a bloodthirsty god. Evidence suggests that, while extreme protectiveness of children is hard-wired in the human brain, it exists alongside a predilection for murdering them shortly after they are born....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-infa...th-poverty

here ya go
skipping to the good bits


https://discover-the-truth.com/2013/09/0...n-history/

10. The ’American Bar Association’ Journal [August 1996]:

“1275 English common law criminalizes statutory rape- sex between a man and a woman below the age of consent, which was first set at 12 years.
1576 Common Law age of consent lowered to 10 years.
1700s-1800s Statutory rape at common law adopted in the united states. States set the age of consent at 10 or 12 years.” [10]

11. Sinikka Elliott

“The statutes governing the minimum age under which sex cannot be legally consensual, and laws concerning marriage and workers rights, were modified to reflect these changing discourses around childhood. Age of sexual consent, for example, rose from 7 during colonial times to 10, 12, and eventually as high as 14 during the eighteenth centuries. By the late 1800s, the average age of consent in the United States was 14. Across the nation, however the age of consent was raised slowly, unevenly, and with great reluctance.” [11]

keeping in mind in the USA bibble belt this is still practiced as normal social culture by thousands of people

[Yazata]

If there’s one thing we can still agree on in this era of political polarisation, it is that the life of a child is sacred.

So CC posts something intended to subvert even that.

When the ethicist Peter Singer suggested that, in theory, a baby’s life might be less worthy of protection than an adult’s because its consciousness is less developed, there were irate calls for him to lose his job.

I don't follow Peter Singer or pay much attention to him. But isn't his big thing animal rights? I seem to recall that he wants to accord all sentient animals some stripped down subset of human rights. So I'd guess that his argument about infanticide was meant as a reductio ad absurdem of Cartesian-style arguments that because animals don't have the power of speech or human-like cognition, they are just organic machines and shouldn't receive any consideration or have any rights.

The exact same argument can be made about human infants!

Furthermore, it seems reasonable to suppose that this attitude is genetically determined. What could be a more basic evolutionary imperative than to protect one’s offspring from harm?

I don't think that instincts in human beings work by determining things as if humans were robots (or simple worms). Instead they create abilities and predispositions towards behaving in particular ways. But human beings generally have the ability to improvise around these tendencies. The tendencies can be expressed in many different ways, or sometimes they aren't expressed at all. (Just look at the language instinct.) I would say that human beings do seem to have a strong 'protect our own children' predisposition. (A predisposition that weakens the more distantly related the kids are. It's very weak in the abstract, when it becomes 'all of humanity's children') It isn't set in stone either and other motivations might over-rule it.

The only problem with this simple account is that for most of human history infanticide was a common and accepted method of family planning

I wonder how common it was and how accepted. What is the data? Some anecdotal stories in historical writings?

and the perceived innocence of children was less likely to win them special care and more likely to make them seem like ideal sacrifices to a bloodthirsty god.

The whole idea of a sacrifice is that it is a sacrifice. One gives up something of value. If infant lives had no value, they wouldn't serve their function in the sacrifice.  

Evidence suggests that, while extreme protectiveness of children is hard-wired in the human brain, it exists alongside a predilection for murdering them shortly after they are born....

Again, what evidence?

I'm not sure what this woman's thesis is. What is she arguing for? The moral justifiability of infanticide? If so, she hasn't made her case.

(Peter Singer did better, even if his purpose was to argue for the exact opposite.)

[C C]

[C C]

Never heard of the Fritzl case before. That is way worse than that movie Room.

You know, when I googled his name a twitter account popped up. Do you think there’s any way that prisoners in Austria have internet access?

Hard to say about the Austrian system. One anecdote about the matter in the US:

Inmates are not allowed to tweet directly, but with specific approval, they can express themselves through Twitter. I run a program at San Quentin called the Last Mile and we provide "tweet sheets" for each of the men once a week. These sheets have a 140 character box for each day of the week for them to use. We collect the sheets every week and load them into Twitter using the Socialoomph scheduling tool. [...] The men express their feelings, talk about their daily activities, and provide an insight into what they are going through. It provides an outlet for them and also an opportunity for people to see that they are intelligent, articulate and genuine.

Another POV:

Recently, I called an inmate in the California state prison system to get the low-down on the availability of smartphones in prison, what they're used for, and how much they cost. My source told me that prisoners are posting to Facebook, uploading videos and photos to Instagram, and tweeting directly from their cell blocks. There have been plenty of reports about this trend, but most of them have centered around the use of contraband and illegal cell phones and the prison authorities' attempts to combat their introduction and use.

But as a former prisoner I know that you don't need a cell phone to gain access to social media. I began my career as a writer from inside, enjoying all the social media platforms available to people on the outside. With the growth of the internet, the world has opened up, even to prisoners. The technological advances we take for granted have made their way into the darkest corners of America. With most prisoners enjoying access (of a sort) to email these days, it's made it that much easier for them to get on social media.
(How Prison Inmates Get on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram)

Charles Manson had twitter accounts, but ones probably set-up by various fruitcakes around the world either posing as him or claiming to represent him. In the past one would occasionally hear of Manson having a website; later it was clarified that external parties he was in mail / telephone contact with might have been maintaining it. A definite instance of that was his fiancée of recent years establishing several of them, prior to their engagement ending circa 2015.

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