INFANTICIDE

According to a demographic survey of over 600 primitive populations carried out by William T. Divale of the American Museum of Natural History, there is an extraordinary consistent imbalance of boys over girls in the junior and infant age ranks (up to about 15 years old). [Divale says] that many primitive groups follow a practice of overt female infanticide. Female children are suffocated or simply left unattended in the bush. But more often infanticide is covert, and people usually deny that they practice it.... Warfare inverts the relative value of the contribution made by males and females to a group's prospects for survival. By placing a premium upon maximizing the number of combat-ready adult males, warfare obliges primitive societies to limit their nurturance of females. It is this, and not combat per se, that makes warfare an effective means of controlling population growth.... Lacking any safe and effective means of contraception or abortion, primitive peoples must focus their institutionalized means of population control on individuals who are already alive. Children are the logical victims of these efforts—the younger the better—since number one, they can't resist; number two, there is less of a social and material investment in them; and number three, the emotional ties to infants are easier to cut than those between adults. Anyone who finds my reasoning depraved or "uncivilized" should read about eighteenth-century England. Gin-soaked mothers by the tens of thousands regularly dropped their babies into the Thames or wrapped them in the clothing of smallpox victims, left them in trash barrels, rolled over on top of them during drunken stupors, and otherwise contrived to shorten their babies' lives by direct or indirect means.