For those of you who are notorious for your weak stomachs, I suggest very seriously that you turn away. For those of you who find
ABORTION loathesome, read on.
Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her."
John-Thor Dahlburg
Infanticide - literally the killing of a newborn child - is most practiced in China and India, where populations have grown to a density unknown elsewhere on earth. Space is at a premium, and in the case of China, the national government has placed a strict one-child per household mandate on it's population. And in India, parents of a woman are required to pay an impossibly expensive dowry when the woman get's married to a man. In such archaic cultures, the dowry system is in full force, and women are still considered posessions. Past generations are dependant on their child to support them into their older years. In short, if a family has a female child, they will have nobody to support them later. Seeing this pressure, while not justifiable, one might understand the practice of terminating a daughter to make room for a son.
Infanticide, however, is also a problem in the United States. According to the United States Bureau of Justice, 607 children were killed in 1999, 379 of them under the age of 2, and 256 of them not even having reached their first birthday.
An 18 year old at the prom gives birth in the restroom. The newborn infant is strangled to death. Then, leaving blood on the walls and floor and leaving her firstborn son's dead body in a trash can, Melissa Drexler of New Jersey cleans herself up and returns to the party to eat a salad, request a song, and dance the night away.
Canem - David Bunnell