Infanticide in the Ancient World
Throughout much of history and across many societies, infanticide was an accepted means to dispose of unwanted children. Infant exposure was widely practiced in ancient Greece. It was the preferred method to get rid of unwanted children because, to the ancient Greeks, it was not as immoral as the outright murder of a baby. They reasoned that an exposed infant’s fate was in the hand of the gods, who might directly intervene to rescue the child, or a kind-hearted passerby might do so. The exposure of infants often took place in difficult times that made an extra mouth to feed problematic. However, some took the practice further, and took infant exposure from cruel necessity to eugenics. The philosopher Aristotle, for example, advocated that deformed infants be exposed.
As Aristotle put it: “[L]et there be a law that not deformed child shall live“. Whether to keep or expose an Greece was usually the father’s decision. In Sparta, however, a group of Spartan elders made that choice. The goal was to produce strong warriors to maintain Sparta’s military dominance. To that end, the Spartan state involved itself in the selection of parents for their physical and mental traits. The authorities decided which newborns to keep, and the state was involved in the upbringing of children, who were raised in brutally tough boarding schools, to ensure their development in accordance with Spartan ideals. Thousands of years later, a eugenics movement arose, and had its heyday in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Modern eugenicists looked back at history, and filled with admiration for Spartan manliness and hardihood, figured that the ancient Spartans were on to something.
