The Population Decline Thread

[Razgovory]

You've heard of changelings?  A European myth that fairies would steal children and replace them with a fairy.  The fairy would be useless, unable to function as human being.  The solution was to take the changeling and leave it in the forest.  That's how they dealt with the clearly disabled.  They convinced themselves the child was a fairy and left it out in woods to die.  The pre-modern world was rough.

[crazy canuck]

Do you have some evidence for the claim of wide spread infanticide?

I'm not in a position to proclaim whether the argument is correct or not, nor to state what the current scholarly consensus is, but as I understand it's been a fairly mainstream scholarly theory that infanticide was fairly common in pre-Christian Europe at least.

Again, source?  Keep in mind that the Christian writers had a penchant for demonizing non-Christians.

[Razgovory]

Clergy had children until the 1100s. And even then the rule requiring abstinence was more honoured in the breach.

Also, the rule had nothing to do with population control.

Nuns were often married and had children before entering the nunnery.

Do you have some evidence for the claim of wide spread infanticide?

I mean the Romans were pretty upfront about it.  From the Vindalania letters, we have actually have a soldier telling his wife to kill the child if it's a girl.  I think that a lot of cultures had a major imbalance between men and women mostly favoring men. Infanticide was pretty common among hunter-gatherers and neolithic cultures. 

One letter does not make it common.  And what is your source for hunter gatherers and neolithic cultures practicing it?

Other writers mention it, and note that it strange when other cultures didn't do it.  Roman and Greeks had a problem with child sacrifice, but drowning a child because it was female was okay.  I believe there are plenty of anthropological studies that show that infanticide was pretty common among hunter-gatherers.  Like 75% of children were abandoned to death.
As for a source on Greeks and Romans one needs to look to Aristotle:

As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared; but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit fixed to the procreation of offspring, and if any people have a child as a result of intercourse in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practised on it before it has developed sensation and life; for the line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.

-Aristotle, Politics

[grumbler]

What is the argument being made regarding infanticide? That it occurred seems to me to be a truism.

[Jacob]

Again, source?  Keep in mind that the Christian writers had a penchant for demonizing non-Christians.

So my impression is a synthesis of reading I've done over the years, but doing a bit of quick internet search it certainly seems that infanticide being a practice has some support among scholars:

The abstract of the article A critical assessment of the evidence for selective female infanticide as a cause of the Viking Age states:

There currently exists in the study of Viking archaeology a strong support for the theory, popularised by Barrett (2015), that selective female infanticide in the Late Scandinavian Iron Age to Early Viking Age resulted in the sudden expansion of Scandinavian influence, through raiding, invading, and trading, across Europe that categorises the Viking age

To me that's sufficient to accept the fact that the idea that the vikings practiced infanticide has scholarly support.

It's an archeological fact that the remains of infants are often found buried in the floors of human dwellings. The author of Ritual Bones or Common Waste does not writing directly about whether the remains are the result of infanticide, but nonetheless states:

The reason behind the infant burials placed in the middle of settlements that usually lack human graves is intriguing. Several possible explanations including separate burial customs for very, small children, infanticide, sacrifice or magical rituals, can be envisioned.

The abstract of the article Sex Identification in Some Putative Infanticide Victims from Roman Britain Using Ancient DNA states:

Infanticide has since time immemorial been an accepted practice for disposing of unwanted infants. Archaeological evidence for infanticide was obtained in Ashkelon, where skeletal remains of some 100 neonates were discovered in a sewer, beneath a Roman bathhouse, which might have also served as a brothel. Written sources indicate that in ancient Roman society infanticide, especially of females, was commonly practised, but that females were occasionally saved and reared as courtesans. We performed DNA-based sex identification of the infant remains. Out of 43 left femurs tested 19 specimens provided results: 14 were found to be males and 5 females. The high frequency of males suggests selective preservation of females and that the infants may have been offspring of courtesans, serving in the bathhouse, supporting its use as a brothel.

My reading over the years has mostly been focused on pre-Christian Europe, but in searching for answers for you I came across Death Control in the West 1500–1800: Sex Ratios at Baptism in Italy, France and England - a suggestion that infanticide was quite widespread in early modern (1500-1800) Europe as well (you can read an article about it here).

So the scholarship on infanticide does not seem to be all about demonizing pre-Christian populations.

Like I said in my post, I'm not sufficiently educated to have an opinion on whether the interpretations are correct or not, but it seems pretty clear to me that there's scholarship that argues that infanticide was accepted practice.