page_title: Infanticide
section_title: India
hierarchical_section_title: Infanticide / History / Asia / India
caption_attribution_description: English: Hindoo Woman and Child (March 1852, p.24, IX)
context_page_description: Infanticide is the intentional killing of infants. Now universally illegal, infanticide was a widespread practice throughout human history that was mainly used to dispose of unwanted children. Its main purposes were controlling population growth and saving resources from being spent on weak or disabled offspring. Unwanted infants were normally abandoned to die of exposure, but in some societies they were manually killed.
  Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans. A few ancient societies did not practice infanticide, such as ancient Egypt and the ancient Jews.
  Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium AD. Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban it across the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD.
context_section_description: Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in South Asia for illegitimate female children during the Middle Ages. According to Firishta, as soon as the illegitimate female child was born she was held "in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death". The practice of female infanticide was also common among the Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Bengal, Miazed, Kalowries in India inhabitants, and also among the Sindh in British India.
  It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the sharks in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.
  According to social activists, female infanticide has remained a problem in India into the 21st century, with both NGOs and the government conducting awareness campaigns to combat it.
  In India female infanticide is more common than the killing of male offspring, due to sex-selective infanticide.
caption: Hindu Woman carrying her child to be drowned in the River Ganges at Bengal (1852)[86]
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