Claudius F. Mayer: From Plato to Pope Paul / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 17. (Budapest, 1989)

Todas,

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3 only female infants were murdered, since to keep up the tribe less females are needed. Among the central Eskimos, only girls and children of widows and of widowers were destroyed.

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4 In the New Hebrides, if a malformed child was born, both child and mother were killed.

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5 In the Mukjarawaint, and some other tribes the grandparents or the old women of the village had to decide wheter a child was to be kept alive or not.

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6 The grandfather or father killed the non-wanted baby by striking it against the mother's knee and knocking it on the head.

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7 In Greenland, deformed sickly children, and those whose mother died at birth were killed if none could be found to take their care.

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8 This was also customary in New South Wales in the 18th century.

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9 The Abipones killed all children after the second one. The Comanches killed one of two twins.

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0 In Tahiti, members of a famous secret society of nobles killed all their children; a piece of cloth dipped in water was applied to the infant's mouth and nose until it suffocated.

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1 The motives of infanticide sometimes were very peculiar. In all the tribes of the Wotjo nation, and also elsewhere, when a child was weak and sickly, they used to kill his infant brother and sister, and feed the child with the flesh of his sibs to make him stronger.

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2 In Formosa, it was considered disgraceful for a woman to conceive before the age of 35 or 36. If she became pregnant earlier, her child was killed by the priests.

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3 The wide spread of infanticide can be demonstrated by the New Zealand Maoris among whom women were found who slaughtered 4 to 7 children, mostly females.

34 The Jagas, a conquering tribe Angola, were reported to have put to death all their children without exception so that their women might not be encumbered with babies on the march. They recruited their tribal members by adopting sons and daughters of 13-14 years of age of parents whom they had killed and eaten.

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5 Women of the Mayas used to murder all their children except the one they believed to be the last.

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6 It is said that this practice entirely destroyed a branch of the Maya nation.

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7 In Madagascar, if the newborn's fate was declared unlucky by the astrologer the infant was destroyed. The laws of natives often ordered infanticide. At the Gilbert Islands, native laws specified that a married pair should bear no more than four children. The husband had to decide how many children should live.

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8 In Vaitapu, the primitive tribal law ordered that not more than two children might live in a family.

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9 Modifications of infanticide are abandonment, exposure, starvation, and selling of children into slavery.

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0 Amerindians generally exposed their deformed offspring and children.

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1 Sometimes, children were abandoned for difficuly of support. In Spanish provinces, Indians were prevented from destroying their children, and there the travellers found many of them deformed, dwarfish, mutilated, blind, and deaf.

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2 Delayed lactation. Among women there is an universal belief that they are infertile while nursing. For this very reason, primitive women all over the world suckle their babies for a rather long time. The Trobriand Islanders wait until the child asks for solids. Congo mothers do not wean their infants until they are 2-2 1/2 years old.

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3 Prolonged lactation might have been a common practice also in the Stone Age. Gerontocide. The custom of killing the old and the sick for group welfare was 8