Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic More evidence that the sex ratio in cases of infanticide is skewed

A mother in Germany has been arrested on the suspicion that she killed three newborn babies and kept them in her freezer.

The babies were - surprise - girls.

Three baby girls kept in freezer

The woman in question had three living children - two sons and one daughter.

As I was searching the Internet for articles in English about this case, I came across an article about an unrelated case in France, where a mother similarly kept a newborn dead baby girl in her freezer.

French mother kept baby girl in freezer

You know why I bring this up - just to insist that those parents and mothers who do this sort of thing will do it primarily to their daughters, not to their sons.

Ann

And, as always, I think your logic is flawed, Ann, and does a disservice to your genuine concern for the abused. Your logic for this theory is entirely dependant on you ignoring any story with male victims which doesn't fit your preferred theory.

If I were keen - and believe me, I'm not - I could find, in under an hour, a hundred similar stories in which males were the victims.

But I'll leave you with just one. This week, in a tragic story in the UK, a father drove his two young sons to a local beauty spot and brutally stabbed them to death. Not a female victim in sight.

Once again, personally, I'd be much more sympathetic to your viewpoints if your concern stretched to encompass all victims of violence, and not just females.

LabRat

My point is that more girls than boys are killed by their own parents, certainly by their own mothers.

Many years ago, I read an article about "murder patterns" for men and women. This article said that those men who kill people primarily kill other men, but they kill women, too. Women who commit murder also kill men, but almost never other women. With one exception. Women, said the article, sometimes kill their daughters. Nothing was said to suggest that women killed their sons as often as they killed their daughters.

And the reason why I try to raise a racket about this is that no one else does. Because it seems to me that we are in a state of denial about the excess murders of girls.

Ann

Your point may or may not be valid, but you've given no evidence to support it. One or two instances does not support such a broad theory. You need to point to a large study done by a reputable organization, not sensationalized news stories.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Is there a *proper* number of murder of girls?

I think your logic is flawed here as well. Going by your summary of the article (I wish you had linked it so we could all decide for ourselves), the author was making the point that although women seldom kill other adult females, they do sometimes kill child females (ie their daughters). The point was not that they kill daughters more than sons. The point was that they kill female children more than female adults.

Tragic things happen everyday. It's an unfortunate part of life. But "raising a racket" by making broad and unsubstantiated claims about who kills who and why doesn't help matters.

~Anna

When I hear about stories of children being murdered or any gruesome horrific act such as the one you were referring to, I never even notice if it was a boy or girl. Just that it was a human being or that it was a child who missed out on their life and the experience of having loving parents to nurture them.

I don't deny the fact that there is definitely prejudice against women many places in the world but I don't think that every time a woman or girl is killed, it's because they were female. I think that you may feel that way when you read these stories because you feel so strongly about the oppression/inequality of women and thereby perhaps insinuate your beliefs onto the case, whatever it may be.

It doesn't mean that this sort of thing never happens; only that more evidence would be needed to support that theory.

EDIT: Here is a link to the US Bureau of Justice with child homicide statisics. This is only the US' statistics so not sure what other country's statistics would be...
Child Homicide Statistics

I, too, see this as a flawed argument. Just today we had a story in my paper about a woman who drowned her baby BOY in a bathtub. And correct me if I am wrong, but four of the five children that Andrea Yates killed were boys, as well as the two that Susan Smith drove into a lake.

THIS is why the media gets accused of bias. They use two or three cases as an example and boom, a theory is born. Never mind that it's totally slanted. It's like using quotes from three women who are anti-abortion and then stating that clearly, women in general are opposed to abortion.

And as someone who has had fertility problems, it doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl, it's reprehensible.

Having read the article Ann, you've made your assupmtions purely based on what the media has written and that is wrong.

The reports only indicate that foul play has been involved and nothing is concrete as the results of the autopsy still appear to be in it's priliminary stages with toxicology results to come.

I'm in complete agreement with Jenn and Anna's posts in how the media plays part and can often sensationalise everything. I won't go into how many incidences where the media has played part in the ruling of the court system and also in formulating the opinion of the public. The Lindy Chamberlain case over 20 years ago wherein she was accused of killing her baby in the Australian Outback is one that springs to mind

Azaria Chamberlain Disappearance

In the end the conviction was overturned, but the point I'm trying to make is that the media latched on to a case and helped formulate the opinion of the public based on circumstancial evidence.

Labbie's right your theory is based on only two known cases hardly enough to indicate that daughters are often the ones who parents murder. While yes in some countries it is known that daughters are not preferred this does not mean that they are the only ones who suffer abuse or are murdered because over the last few years the few high profile child murder cases have involved boys and not girls.

By this statement at least in my mind you seem to be implying that murder is accpetable because you are telling us that there is an excess number of murdered girls in the world. Murder is wrong regardless of whether the victim is male or female.

I wholeheartedly agree with Anna on this one! While I respect your's and everyone else's opinions based on what you have said I'm not inclined to agree with your statement that the murder of girls is more prevalent than the murder of boys.

Obviously baby boys get killed as well.

But every time I come across a rather gruesome story about murdered children, or for that matter every time I read about a dead baby that has been found somewhere, I try to learn about the sex of the child. Often the newspapers don't report it, at least initially. When I first read about the very recent case in Germany about the babies in the freezer, nothing was said, initially, about the gender of the babies. Yesterday one Swedish newspaper wrote about the case again and mentioned, in passing, that the three babies were all girls. I started googling for articles in English about the case, which I could post here. However, all the articles I found at first were the kinds that didn't mention the dead babies' gender. I had to search for "baby girls in freezer" in order to find what I was looking for. And even then, the first hits I got still didn't mention the dead babies' sex, but instead said that a boy and a "girl" had found the babies, or that the suspected mother of the dead babies already had two boys and a "girl".

In most of the cases where small babies are killed, newspapers often don't mention whether the children are boys or girls, at least not on the first day, when the case usually gets the biggest headlines. As if the baby's gender doesn't matter too much. But my point is that it matters tremendously, because a newborn baby hasn't yet got a "personality". It hasn't got a "history". The mother doesn't yet know what it is like to take care of this child. All the mother really knows about the newborn baby is that it is a baby, and it is a girl - or it is a boy. If baby girls are killed more often than baby boys, that strongly suggests that more mothers are willing to kill a child only because it is a girl.

I looked up the Andrea Yates case. You can read about it here. I think it is worth noticing, among other things, that Andrea Yates first had four sons. She suffered from severe depressions and other mental problems and tried to kill herself. But it was only after she had her first daughter that she turned her violence against her children and killed them, even if this didn't happen when her daughter was newborn.

There were no mitigating circumstances in the Susan Smith case, as far as I can see. But I can say that my own sister-in-law very nearly became a witness when a Swedish mother drove her two small daughters into a lake in Sweden a few years ago. Both girls died. But the case received so little attention here in Sweden that I never read about it in the papers, and I only know of it because my sister-in-law told me.

I'm not saying that no mothers ever kill their sons. Things don't work like that. There are no gender absolutes. You can't say that there are no female school shooters or that there are no female pedophiles. That is simply not true. There are women who do all sorts of things, and there are men who do all sorts of things.

I'll keep insisting, however, that more newborn girls than newborn boys get killed by their mothers. I insist that more newborn girls than boys get killed, period. We know for a fact that it is like that if we consider the whole world. Huge numbers of girls are killed the two most populous countries in the world, China and India.

Female infanticide in India and China

Infanticide, Abortion Responsible for 60 Million Girls Missing in Asia

We in the West like to say to ourselves that we are not like that, but we don't take a hard look at ourselves to see if our self-satisfied assumptions are true or not. What will happen the day scientists come up with an easy way for parents to decide even before conception if their baby will be a boy or a girl? Will boys and girls still be born in more or less equal numbers? And what will happen if significantly more parents want boys rather than girls, and girls become a "natural resource" in short supply? Today we already have a situation where women and children, mostly girl children, are being traded like goods. Large numbers of women, mostly from poorer countries in eastern Europe and from Asia and Africa, are being brought to western Europe to be forced into prostitution. I saw a documentary from China about the lucrative slave trade of women there. Girls and young women are kidnapped and sold as wives to the growing number of men who can't get a wife any other way, because of the increasing shortage of young women in China.

It drives me crazy that no one talks about these things, that's all. I'm not trying to say that each and every woman would rather have sons than daughters, believe me. I know that is not true. Believe me, I, too, have heard expectant mothers say, "I hope it is a girl". I don't doubt for a moment that most mothers here in the West are happy about the children they get, whether they are boys or girls. I'm just saying that one day parents will get the chance to choose the gender of their children even before the woman has become pregnant in the first place. What will happen then? Will most parents still be happy to let nature choose the sex of their child? Will a significant number of parents decide to choose their baby's gender for themselves? And will we still get an equal number of boys and girls when parents can "shop" for the sex of their child? And if we no longer get an equal number of boys and girls in our societies, how will that affect our lives?

Ann

Have you looked up actual statistics about this, Ann? Or are you just going off of various stories you've heard about/read?

If we are going to have intellectual conversations like this then you need to have actual statistics (and a source) to back up your statements. It's just good debate form. You make a claim, then you present evidence to support it. If you have no proof, then it's just an opinion.

For some reason, the second link I posted about 60 million missing girls in Asia won't open. So I'll post a Wikipedia link instead.

According to this link, female infanticide is not a problem limited to poor people or poor families. Instead, it may sometimes be more common among the wealthy.

EDIT: The link that wouldn't open recently can be opened now.

Ann

That's fine, but as it can be altered by anybody, Wikipedia is not generally considered a credible source.

I thought you were arguing girls vs. boys, not rich vs. poor?

It's true that Wikipedia entries can be changed by anybody, so here are a few other links:

For Indias daughters, a dark birth day

BBC: Facts about female infanticide

Born to Die

Female Infanticide

End the biggest holocaust in human history: Female infanticide/feticide!

As for the rich vs. poor argument, it has sometimes been said that poor people preferentially kill their daughters because they can't feed them, but since that is not a problem for us in the West, female infanticide can't happen here. I just wanted to say that female infanticide happens among rich people, too.

Ann

Neglect also pereferentially kills girls, not just outright infanticide and feticide. This is from the first link I quoted ( Case Study: Female Infanticide) :

This quote doesn't clearly stress that boys are given better health care than girls, although it mentions it in passing. I have read elsewhere that this is a typical pattern in many countries. If health care is costly, then it is often just the boys who are considered worth the expenditure of it. If health care is merely an annoyance, for example so that a parent has to stay home from work one day to bring his or her child to a hospital, then it may still only be the boys who are considered worth the sacrifice.

I recently brought up the Madeline Neumann case. Madeline's parents acted very strangely when they refused to take their daughter to hospital, despite what must have been her steadily worsening condition. They chose to pray for her instead of taking her to hospital, rather than pray for her and take her to hospital. I recently suggested that the Neumanns might have opted to take their seriously sick child to hospital if the child had been a boy instead of a girl. Of course I realize that we are talking about an individual case and two parents whose motivations no outsiders can truly know anything about. But let me say that Madeline's case fits a pattern. A child gets sick, the child is a girl, and the parents don't take their daughter to hospital. The girl dies.

Ann

Madeline's parents while their behaviour was unusual, it isn't all that uncommon Ann. Many people with strong religious convictions opt to pray for a miracle. I'm not saying I don't believe in the power of prayer because I do I've had many prayer meetings with friends for various things and wholeheartedly believe that God is listening to our prayers. I've heard many parents refuse to vaccinate their child regardless of whether they are male or female.

However, you only know of the case from an external point of view and a wild accusation such as the one you made that implies that Madeline's parents would have taken her to hospital if she'd been a boy is again wrong. You don't know the circumstances of the situation. Some people just don't trust doctors or have had bad experiences you don't know.

While it's true that many women are forced into prostitution you also shouldn't imply that all are forcibly taken because again it is another wild accusation. You don't know the circumstances that got them there like say for example the drug use. All you are seeing is again what the media paints or what you have heard.

In regards to what I read and hear I prefer to keep an open mind and not let news reports sway my convictions straight away until I have all the facts. For example I've read stories in various newspapers and the watched the TV news and noticed many inconsistencies in the reports for this reason I don't rely on one source for my information.

Like I said, there is no way that I can know that Madeline Neumann's parents would have taken her to hospital if she had been a boy. I'm just saying that there is a pattern which says that some parents take their sons to hospital, but not their daughters.

This, however, is not an American pattern. Neglecting to take your daughter to hospital is in no way whatsoever a part of American mainstream culture. Instead, I'm sure that the overwhelming number of Americans (and Europeans) know that if their child dies because they have wilfully neglected to take him or her to hospital, everyone around them will be absolutely horrified. Doing that sort of thing to your child is not only bad, it is unthinkable. If you let your behaviour be guided by mainstream American or European culture or thought patterns, it is unthinkable to neglect your child like that.

But I think that Madeline's parents are so religious that they can't fully be regarded as loyal to American mainstream culture. I refuse to believe that most Americans think it would be okay to let their child slowly waste away and do nothing more than pray for him or her!

Because the Neumanns were so religious, they let their religious belief guide them when it came to their approach to their daughter's illness, not the question of what others would do or what others would think.

Other strong beliefs, not only religious ones, can similarly affect a person so that he or she behaves in a way that is not acceptable according to the mainstream culture of the country where this person lives.

So causing the death of young girls by neglecting to take them to hospital when they are seriously ill, although you would take the girl's brother to hospital if he suffered from the same illness, is not part of American culture. But I strongly believe that it is part of the traditions in some other countries. I have read a lot of feminist literature and also reports from the United Nations which strongly suggest that there are countries and cultures where girls don't get as much or as good health care as boys receive.

But to the very best of my knowledge, there are no countries or cultures that preferentially mistreat boys, so that boy children get less health care than girl children.

Why would there be cultures - several cultures - that preferentially mistreat girl children in terms of health care, but possibly no cultures that preferentially mistreat boy children when it comes to health care?

This is what I believe. Bottom line, it has to do with deeper and more fundamental things than cultures and thought patterns. My answer is that so many people believe, deep down and perhaps on a subconscious level, that boys are more valuable than girls. Because of that belief, it becomes easier to to turn female infanticide into something socially acceptable - to turn it, in fact, into a part of a culture. It may not be exactly nice to kill your daughter, but people will understand you if you do it. Because she was only a girl, after all.

I believe that this "higher estimation of boys" may be something universal. I'm not saying that it is so strong that people normally will not want to keep their daughters. Of course not. But an instinctive feeling that boys are a little more valuable than girls may be there anyway.

Suppose it is "normal" or "human" to place a higher value on boys than on girls. If you live in America or in Europe, you are not allowed to act on that preference very much, because our cultures force us to take care of our children regardless of their gender. If you don't do that, you may be ostracized, or the social services may take your children away from you. But if you have a strong alternative belief, so that you don't much care what the mainstream culture of your country teaches, you may listen to your deep subconscious preferences instead. And just possibly, these subconscious preferences may tell you that a daughter's illness might present the perfect opportunity to test your own religious faith, whereas a son's illness would prompt you to take him to hospital after all.

Okay. Am I jumping to conclusions here? Yes, I realize that I definitely might be. But is it certain that what I say is nonsense? I ask you to at least consider the possibility that our future ability to preselect the sex of our children may have dire consequences for society, and certainly for women and for anything resembling equality between the sexes, if you believe in that sort of thing. If, when push comes to shove, people really prefer to have more sons than daughters, what will our society be like?

Ann

Ann, I like to stay out of these debates becuase I usually don't agree with your statements so I keep my opinions to myself. However, this statement seems a bit ridiculous. Since the beginning of time, men and women have existed. Women have been gaining more and more respect, power, ane equality with each passing decade. To even think that eventually one gender will, in effect, die out seems kind of crazy to me. If we've been able to survive this long what makes you think that society will shift so much that women will no longer exist?

Even if your claims are true that in certain areas people prefer sons to daughters, I have to disagree that it will become a widespread societal problem. And not because our cultures "force" us to care no matter what gender. I believe more in human nature forcing us to love our children.

I'm sorry, Ann, but I really don't understand where you are getting your obviously very steadfast opinions from. I have certainly not witnessed any kind of "higher estimation of boys" that would cause me any concern about our society. While I am just a college student living in the United States, I do look at world news. I know bad things happen out there, but certainly not biased towards females enough to cause widespread alarm that one day the entire global society will make it alright for people to choose having boys over girls.

~Kristen

Not sure if anyone checked out the link I posted in my first post but that is the US governement website and the last graph shows that males kill more male babies than female. It shows that females generally kill about the same number of female & male babies, different spikes in different years.

Thanks for the link, Steph! Very, very interesting. It could be, indeed, that people in the United States truly appreciate girls as much as they like boys, and that your country will still produce a roughly equal number of boys and girls when it becomes medically possible to pre-select the gender of one's child. If that is true about your country, then let me say that my admiration for America will increase almost exponentially. Moreover,if you manage to keep sex rates equal when people get to choose the sex of their children themselves, then you will be in my book such a shining example to the world, and such an inspiration and a bringer of hope. And I mean that, without irony.

You may know that I was raised on the Bible. Well, in the Bible there are many stories about proud mothers giving birth to sons, but, to my knowledge, only one story which even mentions the name of a woman who gave birth to a daughter. The woman in question was Leah, one of Jacob's wives, who gave birth to a daughter, Dinah. Well, Leah also had six sons, and Dinah probably gave Leah little joy, as she caused trouble for her entire family by having an unsuitable love affair. Compare that will all the stories about mothers who had important sons: Sarah gave birth to Isaac, Rebecca to Jacob, and Leah and Rachel had many important sons. Hannah was the mother of Samuel, the prophet. Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist, and Mary had Jesus, of course. So the Bible often celebrates a woman for having a son, but it doesn't exactly tell a woman that it is great to have a daughter.

If you read, say, ancient Greek mythology, you also don't get the impression that women are as valuable as men. I have read claims that female infanticide was common in ancient Greece. In the Bible there are more examples of "trafficking": town are raided and razed, but the young women from those towns are kidnapped and forced into marriage with Hebrew men.

Here's a link which summarizes the problem about "missing women", the excess killing of women and female infanticide:

Missing Women

It is of course possible to say that none of this is true, or if it is true, it doesn't really matter. I try to argue that it is true, and that female infanticide and other forms of comparatively killings of women happen in many countries and cultures, not only China and India.

This link claims that the Romans brought female infanticide with them wherever they went and exported it to the countries which they conquered:

What the Romans did to us

In other parts of the world, there are other practises which also lead to an unnaturally high mortality for women. For example, in many parts of Africa, HIV has increasingly become a women's disease:

Why We Are Failing African Girls

Note that it says that African girls are sometimes raped by men who are HIV-positive, because these men believe that they themselves will be cured of the disease if they have sex with a virgin. (And of course, if these men rape a very young girl, the chances are better that she is a virgin.)

The article says that girls in Tanzania and Zambia get infected at a younger age than boys, so that three times as many girls aged 15-19 are infected as boys the same age. This must almost invariably lead to a very high mortality rate for women in these countries, because you must remember that there is no cure for AIDS, and relatively few people in Africa can afford the drugs that keep the disease under control.

Anyway, is "gender planning" for babies a problem at all? According to this article from The Observer, clinics which offer parents the chance to select their baby's gender already exist in Great Britain and the United States:

There are fears that those who ask for help to select their children's gender often prefer boys:

(HFEA means Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.)

But let me return to your graph, Steph. A problem with it is that it talks about children under five, rather than children under one. At two, three or four years of age, children have certainly developed a "personality", and they can be killed because of that personality. It is only when babies are close to newborn that they can be killed for their sex only.

But as far as it goes, the graph certainly suggests that there is no excessive violence against girls in America, and that American parents and American people in general value girls as highly as boys.

Ann

I think it's interesting that you chose this incident to again point out what you think about woman and their role in society. I'm not going to comment on whether I think you're right or wrong.

There was another tragedy about the same time in Austria. A man kept his daughter in captivation in his cellar. He had raped her over several years and fathered seven children. Moreover he raised some of their children with his wife, telling everyone what a bad mother his daughter was. He claimed that he didn't know where she was and that she had left her children alone, leaving them at his door step.

Ann, since you had to use an example from Germany, I think I should say what I noticed - or didn't notice.

First of all, lately there are often occurences of infanticide. And, although these occurences are only recently being noticed, many of them happened one or even two decades back. Whether this happens to more boys than girls, I cannot say. I never noticed anything odd. But there seem to be two groups of women who commit infanticide: On the one hand, it's very young, often teenage mothers who kill their first baby in a state of shock because until the end, they denied their pregnancy. On the other hand, it's women who've already had several children and don't want to have any more of them. These are the notorious (or habitual?) baby killers. And, interesting enough, their husbands claim equivocally to haven't noticed their wives' pregnancies. Honestly, how can they be so blind?

Second, when it comes to killing older children, I'm not sure if there is a difference between the number of boys versus girls. Maybe so, maybe no.

Third: There definitely is a gap between the number of girls and boys abducted/abused/killed by an out-of-family party. Through my years actively reading newspapers (even if it was only yellow press, which I preferred as a eight-to-ten-year-old), there were countless cases of girls disappearing and turning up dead and, often, mutilated or abused. I only remember two or three cases where boys happened to be the victims. And in one of these cases, it was a couple of siblings (boy and girl).