Infanticide in Ancient Rome

Russell Silvey
Intro to Anthropology
Monday 6:30 9:15

Infanticide; the murder of babies. The name brings to mind slaughter and
holocaust on a large scale. In the article that is being written about there is a description
of a sewer filled with the suffocated corpses of infants who had the misfortune of being
born to a prostitute. It is obvious how this article relates to anthropology as the act of
infanticide is a cultural phenomenon which has been tolerated in most cultures
throughout the world for centuries. Perhaps the question best asked is how can we take
this knowledge and use it in an applicable way in our daily lives?
Infanticide makes sense from a physical point of view. As the article states, this
practice was the least harmful to the mother and the most effective way at the time to
limit family size. And unlike the mass slaughter that one might envision from the word, it
is more likely that poor women were most often the perpetrators of infanticide because
they simply could not care for the children and killing them was viewed as a mercy rather
than letting them live in squalor.
The modern day equivalent of infanticide is abortion. With modern techniques, it
is now possible for the fetus to be terminated before it is highly developed. Yet why, in
the modern world, do we still practice this type of procedure when so many contraceptive
and preventative methods exist that would prevent the death of a child at all?
This is what makes this article so powerful. It is written in such a way as to be
unbiased, with no moral high ground taken over whether or not the practice of infanticide
was wrong, only that it happened, how it happened, and where. Yet even with such an
unbiased representation, this cannot dampen the view that many people will have that this
was, indeed, a barbaric act. How can knowing about the slaughter of infants throughout

the ancient world have any effect on our evolving Western society that exists today in
America?
Modern Western culture and Americans in specific practice a very high level of
cultural hegemony when it comes to issues like infanticide or abortion. We like to think
that we are morally superior and our way is best. Abortion has become a socially
intolerant act which is looked down upon. Yet in two thousand years, nothing has
changed. Women still make the choice to kill their babies, only now they kill the fetus
before it develops into a child. Even contraception and prevention methods like condoms
are looked down upon by many in our culture. This makes little sense in the overall
scheme of things because it is completely possible to lower the total number of abortions
that our population has by increasing womens access to birth control and condoms. We
live in a modern world where we do not need to kill our children, whether they are at full
term or just fetuses, because we have access to the highest level of health care in the
modern world.
When the issue of abortion is raised in the future it is possible for applied
anthropologists to use this ethnohistorical article to highlight the need for our society to
have increased access to contraception and prevention to make these seemingly barbaric
acts a thing of the past. The modern day war against contraception causes more abortions
than any single doctor has ever performed. As this article shows, women will terminate
an unwanted child somehow; why not make abortion or infanticide less likely to occur if
we have the ability to do so?