Essay On Neonaticide

The act of neonaticide has been going on for hundreds and thousands of years throughout different regions and cultures. Neonaticide is defined as the killing of a child during the first twenty-four hours of life. Both Jan Hoffman the author of “An Infant’s Death and Ancient Debate” and Steven Pinker the author of “Why They Kill Their Newborns” discuss why mothers are able to kill their newborns and how this type of infanticide has been going on for hundreds of years in many different places and cultures. This paper is going to discuss how people are able to commit neonaticide and their reasoning for why they committed it and how mothers should have the final decision if they want kill the baby or not.

Hundreds of women commit neonaticide every year. Pinker says that most of them either kills the baby or they just let them die by throwing them out or by leaving them in a public area. …show more content…
Mammals have to decide how much time, energy, and food to invest into their young. If they see their offspring to be sickly, weak, or not promising of survival they might give up on the offspring and focus for a better one next time. Humans are on the top as extreme mammals. Therefore even human mothers have the ability to decide if they want to keep the offspring or child or if they want to dispose of it because they are not ready to invest the resources into it. In the earlier days mothers witnessed many of their children die and only saw two to three kids live to adulthood. Desperation seems to be the key that drives a woman to neonaticide. A lot of teenage mothers who have kept their pregnancy a secret have been victims of desperation. The sense of guilt and that they are going to be in trouble gets to them. And being panicked because the baby is crying and not knowing anything they end up killing the crying baby in order to make it