Infant Exposure, From Necessity to Eugenics
Infanticide was widely used throughout history and across many societies to get rid of unwanted children. The ancient Greeks widely practiced infant exposure. It was the preferred method to get rid of unwanted children because, to the ancient Greeks, it was not as morally abhorrent as the outright murder of a baby. The way they saw it, an exposed infant’s fate was in the hand of the gods. They might directly intervene to rescue the child, or a kind-hearted passerby might do so.
Infant exposure often occurred in the context of hardships in difficult times that made an extra mouth to feed problematic. Some, however, took that further, and took infant exposure from cruel necessity to eugenics. The philosopher Aristotle, for example, advocated that deformed infants be exposed. As he put it: “As to the exposure of children, let there be a law that not deformed child shall live“. The decision to keep or expose an infant was usually the father’s, except in Sparta, where a group of Spartan elders made that choice. As seen below, however, recent scholarship has cast doubt on whether infant exposure was as common in Sparta as has long been believed.
