In reading the wiki on infanticideit was a fairly commonplace practice across many ancient (and some not so ancient) cultures. People were killing babies left and right for all sorts of reasons, especially female children. It was practically baby genocide in some cases.
In modernity post partum infanticide is a huge taboo and generally considered to be the product of mentally disturbed people if it occurs. Assuming ancient mothers bonded emotionally with their babies like modern babies how could they go along with this? Babies were disposed of like Kleenex.
I think you may be exaggerating a bit, I mean a lot of babies grew up to have, well, babies. But when things are tough, and you’re unbelievably poor, and you don’t have birth control, having a child that’s not going to be able to work the fields (e.g. a girl) and produce food, is a huge burden to the rest of the family. Sure, you might be able to sell her off, but what if you can’t? I think it was mainly an economic decision that perhaps the mother had very little say in.
Going over the wiki article, lots of the "attested examples of “Infanticide” seem to be based upon ancient sources stating that their mortal enemies did it.
With no reliable birth control and limited resources in the old days, infanticide may have been the answer to a lot of what abortion covers today. As for the bond of the mothers, women didn’t have a lot of say so back then. Infanticide was usually an indicator of hard times, and if there’s a question of survival, a mother’s bond doesn’t count for much.
Of course the traditional practice in the Greco-Roman world wasn’t infanticide, it was exposure. Leave the baby in a basket on a hill somewhere. And then the baby’s fate was in the hands of the gods. And this was right after birth, you wouldn’t want the mother to even see the baby before it is taken away.
Lots of room for babies to be picked up by lonely shepherds and raised to adulthood and fulfill various prophecies that way.
The emotional impact of the death of a child is in line with evolutionary expectations: the resources invested and the expected number of grandchildren at the time of death. The loss or still-birth of a newborn reflects the investment of months of resources during pregnancy, and a child that is valuable but still ~15 years away from puberty. The loss of a mature child is usually far more devastating, reflecting the investment of many years of resources, and the fact that the child is that much closer to puberty and the realization of grandchildren.
Under extremely harsh conditions, where the parents’ own survival may be at stake, it’s not too hard to believe that they might “cut their losses” with a newborn. Whereas willingly abandoning (say) an 8-year-old child is inconceivable.
My speculation is a sum of the above: mostly economics mean a lot more when it’s literally a matter of letting your born children starve or keeping another baby. Today we don’t have that kind of pressure. And when infant mortality is high to begin with, the death of a baby is likely seen as something that happens, intentional or otherwise, with depressing regularity.
It’s often presented in historical fiction, and I see no reason to doubt it, as a matter not in the hands of the mother. She gives birth, the midwife whisks the baby away. Within hours, either the midwife or another family member takes the infant out of the house, often while the mother is sleeping after the birth experience.
I can’t imagine it was a measure taken lightly or without soul searching, and sometimes with great anguish, same as abortion today. But if I had no access to abortion and my already born children were facing starvation already, I’d kill my newborn swiftly and as painlessly as possible, rather than see it die slowly and painfully. (Or, more likely, I’d beg someone to do it for me. I’m not sure I could really bring myself to do it.)
That used to be the standard line on Carthage. Many historians claimed that ancient reports of child sacrifice were just anti-Carthaginian propaganda. Then in the last few decades, archaeologists began finding all the mass graves.
I think one factor modern people can’t appreciate is that parents up to around the mid-20th century didn’t regard the death of a child as being all that unusual. Child mortality rates were high. If one out of every three children died of natural causes (and many societies had higher rates than that) the death of a child was something you accepted as a normal part of life.
Archeologists have found grave of small children correct. They could have been killed in sacrifices. Or it could merely be a burial place for those who died young.
This is true, but often people make what I think is an unsupported leap: that this means it didn’t hurt.
Up to 25% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage today. We all probably know a dozen or more women who have had a miscarriage, although we don’t always know about it. And miscarriage still hurts.
People loved their babies and children just as much then as we do now. It was just as heartbreaking and difficult when it happened. They just maybe weren’t as surprised, because the childhood mortality rate couldn’t be hidden like the miscarriage rate.
True but I think it’s human nature to put up defense mechanisms to avoid psychological pain. If the odds of your kid surviving childhood was 1 in 3, I think a mother might postpone attachment or even avoid it altogether in the early stages.
I see women do that today with pregnancies-they don’t get attached until later in the pregnancy to minimize any grief if the embryo/fetus doesn’t survive. The older the fetus, the more traumatic the loss IME.
Many if not most cases of babies stolen by authorities worked the same way: the mother would be told her baby had been born dead and wasn’t allowed to see the corpse. Meanwhile, her perfectly healthy baby was meeting Mommy and Daddy…
Mothers in modern famine- and war ridden countries are in that same boat now as the ancient cultures you describe.
My brother used to pilot in the CAR and he said that people there generally regard death or severe injury in the same compassionate, but hard and matter-of-fact way that we regard a miscarriage. "Tough as nails, those people"were his exact words when he told me about a severely wounded girl he had to fly, sans pain medication, from A to B.
I’m not sure oxytocin will let most women remain unattached to a full term born infant. A few, sure, but even mothers who are willingly giving their babies up for adoption often find the process of surrender wrenching and heartbreaking. They mostly go through with it, but biology is a bitch to fight, even when you know it’s the best thing for your baby.
I seem to recall reading sentiments extremely like those of WhyNot above, in a mid-19th-century novel by a female author (think it may have been an “aside” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) – i.e. “the death of offspring in infancy is sadly common; nonetheless, when it happens, the parents grieve bitterly for the lost child”. Admittedly, this would have applied to the relative upper echelons of society in the, even then, relatively sophisticated and advanced Western world; people in tougher circumstances then, quite likely had to be harder as regards this aspect of life, and make less of a big deal of it.
Even if that were true it doesn’t mean the parents didn’t grieve; at most, that they made less of a public fuss than those with more time in their hands.
There are decent arguments for sacrifice IIRC. E.g. most of the children died at a specific age (2-3 months) which would be a curious coincidence if they died of natural causes.
I think you may just find that women’s agency was, in most societies, just that little bit circumscribed until relatively recently. Even if they objected to a culture of infanticide, there wasn’t much they could do about it.