Infanticide Quotes

In primates at least, infanticide seems to have been the crucial factor driving the evolution of monogamous mating systems. ~ Robin I.M. Dunbar

As well as the factory euthanasia and mass poisoning of undesirables and sicklies and uglies, it was the policy of all Earth system settlements that all newborn babies should be carefully scrutinised. And any infant which didn't get the requisite number of ticks on his or her Future Citizen's Examination (with categories including pre-natal health, birth weight, potential IQ, and parental DNA mix) would be terminated. Abortion was, in fact, a thing of the past; infanticide was now considered to be a much fairer method of quality control. ~ Philip Palmer

It has long been noticed that juries are pitiless for robbery and full of indulgence for infanticide. A question of interest, my dear Sir! The jury is afraid of being robbed and has passed the age when it could be a victim of infanticide. ~ Edmond Francois Valentin About

Preventing female infanticide is equally important in protection of women's rights. ~ Nita Ambani

Children are being killed, because some "adults" think life is a game.

Something is amiss.

When children shoot up other children in school, it's a national tragedy, and a week of mourning.

When grown men are killing unarmed young, yes unarmed young, it bespeaks the leagues of fear residing in these men's hearts; that they've created a world in which they themselves have become useless.

Then it makes front page, and it becomes business as usual.

Something is amiss here.

If adults don't truly grow up, then their young may never get the chance. ~ Justin K. McFarlane Beau

We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide ... t here is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning. ~ Ronald Reagan

It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction. ~ Suzanne La Follette

So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof And Sheryl WuDunn

One accurate way to describe abortion is subtle infanticide. That is: child-killing done in a way that the people don't recognize it as child-killing. That reality is why the word abortion exists. Some words are created to cloak reality the same way procedures are created to cloak reality. "Abortion" is cloaked child-killing ~ John Piper

There is no lie. The world is presented as it is. Nothing is concealed, except for perhaps the identity of the Creator, which is not so much a lie as it is a reasonable omission. No view is, however, disguised. No composition of the natural landscape is purposefully twisted or deformed so as to deliberately deceive, and no function of the natural world is dressed in sweet deception. No scream is muffled, no laceration sanitised, and the pain of hunger and thirst are naked for all to see and be sickened by. Diseases of every ghastly flavour are on loathsome display, the blights of parasitism are laid bare, and the crippling agonies of old age are public property. The terror of predation is revealed in every anguished look, the fear of infanticide written on every mother's face, and the misery of earthquakes, landslides, cyclones, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, heat waves, and wild fires conferred uncensored upon stunned and appropriately intimidated audiences. ~ John Zande

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were a 'colony of heaven' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Anyone who believes we're living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females - from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking - has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history. ~ Gloria Steinem

Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome - a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly. ~ Lesley Hazleton

We sometimes hear people voice doubts about opposition to sex trafficking, genital cutting, or honor killings because of their supposed inevitability. What can our good intentions achieve against thousands of years of tradition? Our response is China. A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. Foot-binding, child marriage, concubinage, and female infanticide were embedded in traditional Chinese culture...So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures. One lesson of China is that we need not accept that discrimination is an intractable element of any society. If culture were immutable, China would still be impoverished and [women] would be stumbling around on three-inch feet. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts.
And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings. ~ Greta Christina

Female prophecy must be situated in the crisis of reproduction in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the peak period for the criminalization of women in England and throughout Europe, as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and witchcraft reached their highest rate. It was also the period in which men began to wrest control of reproduction from women (male midwives appeared in 1625 and forceps soon thereafter); previously, "childbirth and the lying-in period were a kind of ritual collectively staged and controlled by women, from which men were usually excluded." Since the ruling class had begun to recognize its interest in increased fecundity, "attention was focussed on the 'population' as fundamental category for economic and political analysis." The simultaneous births of modern obstetrics and modern demography were responses to this crisis. Both, like the witchcraft prosecutions, sought to rationalize social reproduction in a capitalist context - that is, as the breeding of labor power. A recurring motif in the ruling-class imagination was intercourse between the English witch and the "black man" - a devil or imp. The terror was not limited to an imaginary chamber of horrors; it was an actuality of counterevolution. ~ Peter Linebaugh

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs - as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. ~ Charles Darwin

From stalking to chastity belts to female genital mutilation, throughout history men have tried to control women's sexuality and reproductive choices. And women have developed several strategies in response: contraception, abortion, clandestine affairs, mariticide (killing one's husband), and infanticide. ~ Michael Shermer

The day I came squealing and squalling into the world was the first time someone tried to kill me. I guess it should have been obvious to everyone right then that I wasn't going to have a normal life. ~ Justina Ireland

I just called the slaveholder version of Christianity "false." I believe that. But note that in situations of conflict participants view reality differently. The more intractable the conflict, especially where both sides have the capacity to hurt each other, the more difficult it is to determine who is "victim" and who is "oppressor." Think about how nothing is quite as predictable and fruitless as hearing estranged spouses blame each other for being abusive or oppressive. Liberation theology dealt with this perceptual gulf in conflicted situations by speaking of the "epistemological privilege of the poor/oppressed." This meant: the view of the truth of a conflictual situation is clearer from the underside than from the position of power. But this assumes that we know who is on the underside and who holds the power. I am not saying that the exodus-liberation-deliverance motif is invalidated; I am saying that few situations present themselves to us in such clarity as Exod. 1-2 enslavement and infanticide do. ~ David P. Gushee

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide. ~ Rebecca West

We have to join hands and fight against female infanticide, when life is snuffed out the minute people find out it is a girl. ~ Nita Ambani

If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Once the Supreme Court in 1973 decided that infanticide could be legal, it not only ended America's 'inalienable right to life,' it threw the Golden Rule right off the shores of this continent. ~ Michael Moriarty

What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. ~ James Madison

Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life. Then, evolutionary progress became the new moral imperative. This aided the advance of eugenics, which was overtly founded on Darwinian principles. Some eugenicists began advocating euthanasia and infanticide for the disabled. On a parallel track, some prominent Darwinists argued that human racial competition and war is part of the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler imbibed these social Darwinist ideas, blended in virulent anti-Semitism, and
there you have it: Holocaust ~ Richard Weikart

Fond mother, you that will never correct a child, hear the charge, and let it thrill through your heart, exciting emotions of horror, you are a hater of your child; your foolish love is infanticide; your cruel embraces are hugging your child to death. In not correcting him, you are committing sin of the heaviest kind, and your own wickedness, in not correcting him, will at last punish yourself. ~ John Angell James

When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought. ~ Anonymous

Though it isn't obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney , the tales are filled with murder,infanticide,cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse - grimm fairy tales indeed. ~ Steven Pinker

[To the mother of two unruly children in a restaurant after the woman said she really didn't know what to do with her children:] Have you tried infanticide? ~ Joan Crawford

History is full of wrongs done the wife by legal robbery on the part of the husband. I hesitate not to assert that most of this crime of child murder, abortion, infanticide, lies at the door of the male sex. ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide. ~ P.D. James

Most of us believe that eating meat is natural because humans have hunted and consumed animals for millennia. And it is true that we have been eating meat as part of an omnivorous diet for at least two million years (though for the majority of this time our diet was still primarily vegetarian). But to be fair, we must acknowledge that infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as meat eating, and are therefore arguably as 'natural'
and yet we don't invoke the history of these acts as justification for them. As with other acts of violence, when it comes to eating meat, we must differentiate between natural and justifiable. ~ Melanie Joy

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word ... Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. ~ Ronald Reagan

the largest "negative eugenics" project in human history was not the systemic extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany or Austria in the 1930s. That ghastly distinction falls on India and China, where more than 10 million female children are missing from adulthood because of infanticide, abortion, and neglect of female children. Depraved ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Usually this desire [for family limitation] has been laid to economic pressure It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It
has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion. ~ Margaret Sanger