The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,258

calculations based on empathy and mercy is a veto based on human life: an identifiable human’s right to live is not negotiable.

The human life taboo was cemented by our reaction to the Nazi Holocaust, which proceeded in stages. It started with the euthanizing of mentally retarded people, psychiatric patients, and children with disabilities, then expanded to homosexuals, inconvenient Slavs, the Roma, and the Jews. Among the masterminds of the Holocaust and the citizens who were complicit with them, each stage may have made the next more thinkable.143 A bright line at the top of the slippery slope, we now reason, might have prevented people from sliding into depravity. Since the Holocaust a taboo on human manipulations of life and death have put public discussions of infanticide, eugenics, and active euthanasia beyond the pale. But like all taboos, the human life taboo is incompatible with certain features of reality, and fierce debates in bioethics today hinge on how to reconcile it with the fuzziness of the biological boundary that demarcates human life during embryogenesis, comas, and noninstantaneous deaths. 144

Any taboo that contravenes powerful inclinations in human nature must be fortified with layers of euphemism and hypocrisy, and it may have little practical effect on the proscribed activity. That is what happened with infanticide in most of European history. Perhaps the least contentious claim about human nature is that humans are apt to have sex under a wider range of circumstances than those in which they are capable of bringing up the resulting babies. In the absence of contraception, abortion, or an elaborate system of social welfare, many children will be born without suitable caregivers to bring them to adulthood. Taboo or no taboo, many of those newborns will end up dead.

For almost a millennium and a half the Judeo-Christian prohibition against infanticide coexisted with massive infanticide in practice. According to one historian, exposure of infants during the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”145 Milner cites birth records showing an average of 5.1 births among wealthy families, 2.9 among the middle class, and 1.8 among the poor, adding, “There was no evidence that the number of pregnancies followed similar lines.”146 In 1527 a French priest wrote that “the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.”147

At various points in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, systems of criminal justice tried to do something about infanticide. The steps they took were a dubious improvement. In some countries, the breasts of unmarried servant women were regularly inspected for signs of milk, and if the woman could not produce a baby, she would be tortured to find out what happened to it.148 A woman who concealed the birth of a baby who did not survive was presumed guilty of infanticide and put to death, often by being sewn into a sack with a couple of feral cats and thrown into a river. Even with less colorful methods of punishment, the campaign to reduce infanticide by executing young mothers, many of them servants impregnated by the man of the house, began to tug on people’s consciences, as they realized they were preserving the sanctity of human life by allowing men to dispose of their inconvenient mistresses.

Various fig leaves were procured. The phenomenon of “overlying,” in which a mother would accidentally smother an infant by rolling over it in her sleep, at times became an epidemic. Women were invited to drop off their unwanted babies at foundling homes, some of them equipped with turntables and trapdoors to ensure anonymity. The mortality rates for the inhabitants of these h omes ranged from 50 percent to more than 99 percent. 149 Women handed over their infants to wet nurses or “baby farmers” who were known to have similar rates of success. Elixirs of opium, alcohol, and treacle were readily obtainable by mothers and wet nurses to becalm a cranky infant, and at the right dosage it could becalm them very effectively indeed. Many a child who survived infancy was sent to a workhouse, “without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing,” as Dickens described them in Oliver Twist, and where “it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned