Infanticide

Infanticide, from the low Latin infanticidium, refers to the murder of a newborn, a crime found in all societies, in every historical period, and in most cases committed by its mother. The word infanticidium, first used by Tertullian in the Apologeticum (c. 197), denotes a ritual crime of a child in the context of early Christianity. The crime referred to the Holy Innocents—the children of Bethlehem massacred by Herod in the attempt to destroy the Infant Jesus (Matthew 2:16–18)—and/or was associated with the issue of baptism in newborn children. The word infanticide, however, was foreign to the Roman law; there is evidence of its employ in crescendo in Western sources (jurists’ treatises, criminal archives, forensic medicine, literature, encyclopedias, etc.) only since the late sixteenth century. In the early modern period, both Protestant and Catholic countries reinforced the control against child murders in all its aspects to prevent suffocation and pregnancy concealment; the Catholic Church was concerned about saving the souls of newborn children and desired for them to avoid the eternal conditions of Limbo. Infanticide is also perceived as an attempt at birth control and controlling the sex ratio, or as a failed abortion or abandonment. Infanticide was frequently affiliated or confused with abandonment, exposure, suffocation, accidental smothering, concealment, abortion, and homicide, as well as parricide, well into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while during the eighteenth century, infanticide appears more like a crime committed to save honor, and judges were generally indulgent with regard to criminal mothers. In the early twenty-first century, different disciplines that cross the histories of childhood, women, and gender studies—that is, anthropology, behavioral biology, criminology, law history, forensic medicine, demography, psychology, sociology, etc.—set out to give the reasons for this cruel act. Here we finally consider infanticide studies as an independent research subject within a historical perspective separated from the clinical and forensic literature, which developed from the middle of the nineteenth century. Historians dealing with infanticide were often discouraged by the “lack of sources” or by difficulty in identifying the cause of death because infanticide was easy to conceal. Forensic and juridical sources are more abundant starting in the eighteenth century, and from this century on, the crime is finally classified as infanticide. Infanticide in the field of historical sciences is a recent subject of study. There are still no exhaustive studies that bring together all-round works from a chronological and geographical point of view; nevertheless, in recent years these studies are increasing and very promising.

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