Talk:Female infanticide/Archive 1

Archive 1

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i think it would be good to merge this with infanticide Serrastar101 (talk) 19:58, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Sources?

Would it be possible to have some [any] cited sources. For example, the claims about China need documentation (assuming they are true. --Frozenport 21:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I have added that Female infanticide was widely practiced by Arabs in the 6th centruy. This information comes from a video lecture given by Dr. Carl Diemer, professor at Liberty University in Lynchburg VA. I am unsure how to cite this on the main page so I have left the information here. Videos were copyrighted 2005 by Liberty University. Their website is Liberty.edu User:Jazzfrog66 11:45, 19 July 2007

Hi, thanks for adding to the article, but unfortunately I don't think this meets the criteria, and so I have to remove it. I looked up Liberty University and their own website, and thus got to Diemer's page at http://www.liberty.edu/academics/religion/seminary/index.cfm?PID=12824; his qualifications are not in Arab history. Sources need to be verifiable, and usually that means published in a peer-reviewd academic journal. You are almost certainly right on the fact, because the Qur'an spoke out against female infanticide in strong terms, whereas it doesn't, as far as I know, mention footbinding, from which we can deduce that there wasn't much of that going on. A better source would be great; would you like to approach Diener and ask him where he got his facts? BrainyBabe 15:00, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Deletion?

There is precious little information here. Once the discussion of a possible merge of Sex-selective abortion and infanticide and Sex selection is done, I'll probably suggest deleting this stub. Mdbrownmsw 18:03, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Tend to agree - male infanticide is very short as well and the two articles will probably have the same fate. I don't see the above article as being too short, so see no particular reason for splitting it up. Still, if potential can be demonstrated... Richard001 (talk) 06:38, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Lead

"Third world" nation, is probably wrong term. It should be "eastern nation", considering. After cold war, these terms are highly irrelevant. OccultZone (talk) 07:16, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Problematic passage

The section about medieval Europe is problematic for several reasons and will have to be rewritten, more or less from scratch.

1. The following sentence contains serious misrepresentation of sources: In medieval Europe, the large discrepancies in the sex ratio have led to the suggestion of female infanticide with one estimate being 143 boys to 100 girls (cited to: "Kowaleski 2013: 184" and "Herlihy 1995: 224"). First, the figure of 143 to 100 is mentioned only in Herlihy, not in Kowaleski. But Herlihy isn't citing it as an actual figure of sex discrepancy in the population, but merely as an apparent figure in certain medieval census statistics, and then goes on to argue explicitly that it cannot represent the effect of infanticide but must be caused by simple under-reporting of females in those statistics. As for Kowaleski, she is also discussing apparent sex discrepancy in medieval figures and mentions infanticide as a conceivable factor among its causes, but comes to the conclusion that there is no firm evidence for that practice to have been significant; in fact, on the previous page, she discusses claims about infanticide raised by certain authors and judges that these claims have been "convincingly" dismissed by others (again, citing simple under-reporting as the more likely explanation).
2. The preceding paragraph (starting with With the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity…) is, in its entirety, an instance of unduly close paraphrasing from its sole source, "Oberman 2005: 6". (To the extent that significant rewording has been attempted here, it has resulted in nonsensical gibberish (handbooks of penance, where the crime is listed with minor, or venial sins which describe overlying). The contents of Oberman are otherwise more or less correctly represented; however, apart from the close paraphrasing issue, it is questionable to what extent Oberman is a high-quality source and to what extent she represents the predominant view in scholarship. Oberman is not a historian but a jurist and expert in public health administration. She is basically telling her entire story about medieval Europe third-hand, taking it over from Kathryn L. Moseley (1986), "History of infanticide in western society", Issues in Law and Medicine 1: 345–357. Moseley isn't an historian either, but a doctor of medicine. Both Oberman and Moseley display their equal lack of historical expertise by getting the Latin technical term cited in the first sentence wrong: it's not patria potens, which is crassly ungrammatical Latin, but patria potestas. Moseley, in turn, has her story from yet another author, Barbara Kellum (1974), "Infanticide in England in the later Middle Ages", History of Childhood Quarterly 1: 375. But Kellum has been criticized by other authors of constructing a rather one-sided view of the matter and over-estimating the role of infanticide, especially by conflating references to intentional infanticide with references to genuinely accidental killings (types of deaths such as "overlying", which of course might have been used to cover up infanticide in some cases). Barbara Hanawalt (1977, "Childrearing among the lower classes of late Medieval England", Journal of Interdiciplinary History 8: 1–22) states that Kellum based her interpretations on historical sources documented by herself, Hanawalt, in an earlier publication, but then proceeds to interpret these data quite differently. Crucially, Hanawalt argues that in recorded cases where parents reported children as having been accidentally killed, there was no discernible pattern of gender imbalance, as would have been expected if those claims had frequently been a cover-up for intentional (female) infanticide, concluding that intentional infanticide was probably not particularly common.

In sum, I am certainly not denying that there may be enough stuff here to write an interesting paragraph from, dealing with the open debate in scholarship how frequent infanticide might have been and with apparent lack of any firm evidence for it, but the present section in the article isn't it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:02, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Sentence about African-American slaves

In addition to the above, I've also removed the sentence from the "Americas" section that said: In researching smothering deaths by black slaves in the American South, which occurred nine times more frequently than in white families, Michael P. Johnson suggests that sudden infant death syndrome was in fact to blame (which, if it happened in white families, would be heavily underreported because of the social stigma attached). (cited to Johnson, Michael P. (1981). "Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?". The Journal of Southern History 47 (4): 493–520.) Johnson is very explicit that the deaths he discusses were accidental, not acts of infanticide. He is merely discussing whether they were instances of accidental smothering or (according to his hypothesis) of SIDS; the possibility of deliberate killing is quite clearly excluded (p.495: "None of the smothering deaths in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia in 1860 produced even a hint of infanticide"; p.505: "Whatever caused the deaths of these slave infants, they were not smothered intentionally or accidentally by their mothers".) Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:51, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

"Abortion" in lead sentence

I am also going to change the lead sentence, which currently straightforwardly subsumes sex-selective abortion (foeticide) under infanticide (Female infanticide is the deliberate killing of newborn female children or the termination of a female fetus through selective abortion.) This is in contradiction to the huge majority of reliable sources, which remain careful to conceptually distinguish the two. The only source used for making this identification, the V-Day website [1] used in footnote "a" (a self-published website of some pressure group, of unknown reliability), ascribes its definition to "UNICEF", without providing a source to such a definition. However, none of the UNICEF publications dealing with the topic that I could find [2] make such an identification: while they may be discussing infanticide and foeticide in the same context, as reflections of the same overarching set of social issues, they too take care to name them separately and do not subsume the one under the other. (Incidentally, footnote "a" is also misquoting the V-Day website and overstating the claimed link to Unicef, by joining the phrases "As defined by UNICEF" and "female infanticide is defined…" as if they were a single sentence, which in the website they are not.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:48, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Agree. This is a fringe viewpoint. The two are commonly juxtaposed while having little to no relation to each other. --92slim (talk) 00:19, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Bibliography

Balikci, Asen. "Female Infanticide on the Arctic Coast." Man 2, no. 4 (1967): 615. doi:10.2307/2799344.

Muthulakshmi, R. Female infanticide, its causes and solutions. New Delhi: Discovery Pub. House, 1997.

Sayah, Reza. "Killing of infants on the rise in Pakistan." CNN. July 20, 2011. Accessed September 26, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/07/20/pakistan.infanticide/index.html.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/04/the_missing_girlinks.html

Nia Dokes (talk) 00:29, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

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Wikipedia editor

Dear, author of the Female Infanticide I deleted the little information on the Americas and Pakistan because I added information to the headings. Also, I added two more headings to the article which was how Female infanticide affects socio-economics and what are the solutions to solve Female Infanticide.

Nia Dokes (talk) 04:11, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Dear,

Author of Female Infanticide page I deleted information from the Americas article and Pakistan article as well. I added information in the place of deleting the articles and I added on socio-economics and solutions to Female Infanticide. Also, I added on sources to back up my information with proof so that it will not be deleted. Nia Dokes (talk) 02:10, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Improve structure of article

Currently, the article introduces the topic and then jumps into China, Pakistan and India.

I suggest that the first three headings could be structured with the following outline:

• History of female infanticide
  • list of countries here (not only china, india and pakistan)
• Current cases
  • list of countries here

We can even add a section on religious views on this evil practice. I think this would be a great addition to the article.

WatABR (talk) 02:50, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Neutrality dispute

The "Solutions/Programs" section reads more like one person's opinion essay on women's issues in general, rather than a neutral section documenting what WP:RS have to say about eradicating female infanticide in various societies. I have therefore tagged it as noncompliant with WP:NPOV policy. Elizium23 (talk) 14:41, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 August 2019 and 5 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Shelby.weathersby.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:20, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nia Dokes. Peer reviewers: Rstt99, Deashiaterrell, Mychelles.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:20, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

S.s.c chap 9

female 122.177.106.108 (talk) 13:47, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Suggested Improvements for this article

Hi all! Here are some changes/additions that I thought could potentially improve this article. I am adding them here first before I make the changes on the article itself.

-In the second paragraph of the introduction, the article states some basic reasons for why female infanticide still exists (example: the unemployment of women) but fails to consider the role of poverty and the lack of education, which is one of the core reasons this problem exists today. Acknowledging this issue might make for the reader achieving a more clear understanding of the problem.

-There is a need for citations in the Solutions/Programs section of the Female infanticide article. It discusses the “Girl Child Protection Scheme” but does not provide a hyperlink to another website. I would like to add relevant citations to give the reader a chance to learn more about this scheme. Additionally, the link for citation 22 was not giving me any valid results.

-There is also a lack of reliable sources backing the information in the Solutions/Programs section of the article. While it states that certain solutions will “allow females to become individuals being able to raise their social status in terms of women being provided with a better salary,” this does not seem to be supported by any credible sources. I plan to add verifiable statistics that explain the effect of these solutions on the populations of different countries.

-I also feel there is room for improvement when it comes to the organization of this article. Instead of creating a different section for each country where female infanticide is common (such as India, China, and Pakistan), I believe there should be a single section with subsections having the names of each region. There should also be subsections added for regions like West Africa, South Korea, and Liechtenstein which have a relevant history in this topic. There should additionally be information provided on the history of female infanticide in each of these regions and the development of the solutions/laws designed to combat this problem along with their efficiency.

-Lastly, in terms of content, I feel there can be a lot more information in the Consequences/Reactions section. While it has explained the basic effect of infanticide on female populations, it fails to take into account the long-lasting effects of this issue ranging from the possibility of increased sexual violence against females to child abuse.

These are the general ideas I plan to expand on throughout this article (of course, with the help of relevant sources). Let me know if you have any suggestions/ideas to improve on this! Thank you :)

Tdevjani (talk) 23:33, 25 April 2022 (UTC)