Showing posts with label Rome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rome. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2016
Thursday, November 26, 2015
From Right to Sin: Laws on Infanticide in Antiquity
This is the first of three
papers investigating changes in infanticide legislation as indicators of the
attitude of states towards the neonate.
In ancient East Asian societies in
which the bride's family had to pay an excessive dowry, selective female
infanticide was the rule, despite formal interdiction by the law.
In Greece and
Rome children's lives had little value, and the father's rights included
killing his own children.
The proportion of men greatly exceeding that of women
found in many cultures and epochs suggests that girls suffered infanticide more
often than boys. A kind of social birth, the ritual right to survive, rested on
the procedure of name giving in the Roman culture and on the start of oral
feeding in the Germanic tradition.
Legislative efforts to protect the newborn
began with Trajan's 'alimentaria' laws in 103 CE and Constantine's laws
following his conversion to Christianity in 313 CE.
Malformed newborns were not
regarded as human infants and were usually killed immediately after birth.
Infanticide was formally outlawed in 374 CE by Emperor Valentinian.
Purchase full article at:
By:
- 1Department of Neonatology, Charité - University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
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