The Return of Infanticide, Infant Exposure

Both in Greece and Rome, the parent exposed his own child. In our world, we make others complicit in our evil. Babies who are born alive after attempted abortions are handed over to nurses to be abandoned.

ROME (Zenit) - For historians, who inhabit the remote world of the past, the injustices and sufferings of people are sufficiently distant in time to ever have much emotional impact on them.Thus, history can serve as a convenient escape from turbulent contemporary issues.

Studying the plague in 1348 or slavery in the South, it's easy to feel complacent about man's progress through the centuries. Abolition and penicillin seem to testify to humanity's ability to overcome illness and degradation.

And then, as if rudely awakened from a deep sleep, some event will reveal the horrific truth that we haven't budged as much as we would like to think from the darkest practices of antiquity. Human traffickers buy and sell women and children for the pleasure and profit of men, while malaria kills more people than the bubonic plague ever did.

A dear friend shocked me out of my academic coma by sending me a video link. It has already been widely circulated among pro-life circles since 2003, but I was unaware of it until, taking a break from Early Christian Architecture, I clicked on the link.

I watched Jill Stanek, a registered nurse, describing how a child dies after surviving a late-term abortion. I profess total ignorance; I did not realize that these abortions often involved inducing early labor and letting the exposed child die because it no longer had the protective home of its mother's womb. Expelled from the mother's body, and left to die alone among the garbage, a living and breathing child was deemed unworthy to live.

Making matters worse, those who sought to provide protection for those infants by sponsoring the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, were opposed by persons who claim that those children who survive abortions should be left out to die.

It seemed as though I had time-traveled back to antiquity where, in Greece and Rome, the civilized veneer of their clever laws, philosophical speculations and brilliant engineering, co-existed with their sadly primitive customs of slavery, blood sport and exposing unwanted infant children.

In books, it seems so easy to look down on the Ancients for doing something so barbaric as leaving a child out to die. But what are we to make of the tolerance of the presence of this same brutal practice in our modern liberal democracies?In both Greece and Rome, among the majestic temples and sophisticated societies, the harsh utilitarianism of their world began at birth. Children were discarded because of birth defects, single parenthood, economic strain or because they somehow interfered with the well-being of the parents (Oedipus Rex is a famous example of the latter).

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The Greek author Plutarch wrote that "the father took his child and brought it to the elders of the tribe. They examined the child, and if it was well formed and strong, ordered it to be raised, but if the child was ill-born and maimed, they discarded it in the so-called Apothetae, a kind of pit, on the grounds that it was not worth the rearing."

Under the Roman law, fathers, called "paterfamilias," had power of life and death over all the members of their family. Romans claimed that "Romulus compelled the citizens to raise every male child and the first-born of the females, and he forbade them to put to death any child under three years of age, unless it was a cripple or a monster from birth. He did not prevent the parents from exposing such children, provided that they had displayed them first to the five nearest neighbors and had secured their approval."

Compared to our age of abortion on demand, the Romans had more rigorous strictures on putting their children to death.Both in Greece and Rome, the parent exposed his own child. In our world, we make others complicit in our evil. Babies who are born alive after attempted abortions are handed over to nurses to be abandoned. Not only is the child's life destroyed, but forcing nurses, who have pledged to assist and care for people, to stand by as a baby feebly kicks and fights for each dragging breath is to deprive them of their essential humanity.

It is a sad irony that the Ancients come across as more humane than those who oppose the Infants Born Alive Protection Act. By exposing children, they at least left open the possibility of the child being saved whether by a compassionate passerby or the will of the gods. Both Roman and Greek cultures, pious in their own way, left a certain amount of leeway for the gods to act.

Those today who oppose legislation protecting survivors of abortions want to preclude any assistance, any compassion or any recognition of these little lives; their brief experience of the world destined to be cold, lonely, unalleviated suffering.

Two thousand years ago, Christianity came to the rescue of these abandoned children. As early as the first century A.D., they possessed a manual of catechesis, the "Didache." In it the first Christians learned about the ways of life and the way of death. The way of life was a way of love where they were explicitly commanded, "Do not kill a fetus by abortion, or commit infanticide."

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Thanks to Christianity, the exposed infants were saved, nurtured and raised. In our post-Christian culture, these children have lost the protection they enjoyed for a while. Sometimes, sadly, history comes full circle.

Elizabeth Lev teaches Christian Art and Architecture at Duquesne University's Italian campus. She can be reached at lizlev@zenit.org.