My Americana. XIX. The Tiger and The Wolf
Infanticide was widely practiced in China for thousands of years: on the third day after birth, the head of the family decided whether the child was accepted into the clan. If the child was accepted, he or she was considered human and killing such a child was homicide punishable by death. If the child was not accepted ("not lifted up" = buju or fuju), it was not considered human and was either abandoned or killed, with impunity. The connections to the abortion debate in the US are striking: denying humanity to a child by a Chinese parent finds the obvious parallel in American mothers denying this humanity to their unborn children. One can see how it would look a few millenia from now.

A surprising thing is that the opposition to this practice has been promoted from the top beginning from at least 300 BC. There are laws against it from Qin (255-206 BC) and Han dynasties (206 BC - 220 AD). The punishment for the abandonment and killing the infant was the same: tattooing and "wall building" for men and "grain pounding" for women. It appears from these legal codes that these were rather common and seldom punished transgressions. The enforcers themselves were unwilling to prosecute the offenders, who did nothing that their ancestors were not doing for hundreds of years. Given that, why there were such laws?

The Confucians (Zhou dynasty; Mencius & Mozi, 350 BC) argued that the infanticide should not be blamed on the parents; it was the ruler's failing in providing the sufficient support to the families to raise their children. If I understand it correctly, the argument was that the commonality of this practice implies that the ruler is not taking proper care of his people, so the very occurrence of the infanticide casts shadow on his credibility as administrator. This was the official version given to the rulers. The second objection was for internal use and it was that the infanticide violates heavenly harmony: The popular metaphor was that the tiger and the wolf, even though they were voracious animals, do not devour their young. The message was that humans should be at least as humane toward their children as the beasts were towards their offspring. ("Drowning girls in China", DE Mungello)

The infanticide is wrong because it challenges the cosmic balance: humans do what even beasts do not do. The balance will reassert itself, and the consequences will be apocalyptic and universal: everyone will pay for the transgressions of these homicidal parents. Of course, the proponents of the infanticide argued that you cannot kill someone who is not a human, that it was both ancient and perfectly socially acceptable practice, that it was good for the siblings to receive more care, etc. These poor, naive souls were too primitive to make the argument from parent's choice and personal liberty.

The latter advancement had to wait for another 2000 years. I've never understood why our pro-choicers stop at the abortions. Exactly the same arguments can be made about the infanticide, too; all one has to add is that the babies are not human until their parents recognize them as human. They are still clinging to the echo of the old belief informing their ("natural") conviction that a born baby IS human. But they've already rejected the fundamentals of this belief: that it is not theirs to decide who and who is not human, who dies and who lives. Why should one stop half way in this rejection, which is already irrevocably made? Isn't this planet overpopulated? What are we waiting for?

Is it just a matter of time, and in another 50-100 years we'll be right there -- or the very reluctance to go all the way betrays the divided heart?