ABSTRACT
In ancient times, in countries like Greece, babies born with severe abnormalities would be left to die in country fields, and in Sparta in ancient Greece, the killing of weak or deformed infants was required. Both the Republic of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle saw nothing reprehensible about killing defective newborns. Indeed, In his Politics, Aristotle is supposed to have declared:
In ancient Greece, infanticide was a widely accepted practice in conformity with the legal standards of the time. Plato, in The Republic, is again revealing:
Euripides dramatised infanticide in Medea by having Medea kill her two sons. As Weir explains: ‘Young children, weak children, female children, and especially children regarded as being defective were regularly strangled, drowned, buried in dunghills, “potted” in jars to starve to death, or exposed to the elements (with the belief that the gods had the responsibility of saving exposed infants)’ (Weir (1984), p 7). The major determinant of survival for these newborns was the infant’s normalcy. The issue of normalcy was so dominant in Greek thinking that infants were denied the benefit of the doubt so much so that infants who appeared normal but were offspring of ‘inferior‘ parents were also sometimes killed.
