See also: quick facts | baby abandonment | baby doe | partial birth abortion (abortion methods page)

Infanticide is the direct killing - by action or neglect - of a newborn baby. It is usually committed when the child has some mental or physical challenge. Infanticide is a direct result of abortion-on-demand's cheapening of human life.

As C. Everett Koop, M.D., former US Surgeon General, has written, "What started off to be a woman's right to abortion-on-demand has become a woman's right to a dead baby. Inasmuch as a woman has a right to a dead baby, does she not have the right to a dead baby outside the womb as well as inside the womb? Apparently she does! Medical journals published in the U.S. carry clear indication that doctors are practicing infanticide, in reality homicide, and yet the law has apparently turned its back."

The practice of infanticide stems from strictly utilitarian criteria whereby the value of a human being is judged by that person's "usefulness" to society as a whole. Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer, for example, argues that parents should have the option to kill disabled or unhealthy newborns for "a period of 28 days after birth." According to Singer, "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."

So goes the logic of the pro-abortion mantra "every child a wanted child." Children in a culture of abortion-on-demand have become commodities to be embraced or discarded (inside or outside the mother's womb) at the will of more powerful parties. Ohio Right to Life affirms that every child, no matter what degree of disability or dependency, possesses intrinsic dignity and worth and thus deserves to be welcomed into the world and protected by law.

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QUICK FACTS

Infanticide Details in China

(Source: Life Research and Communications Institute.)

• Close to 800,000 baby girls were abandoned or killed in a single region between 1971-80, approximately 8% of all girls born in that decade.
  
  
• 44.6 percent of all girls who were the sixth-born child in lower Yangtze families between 1971-80 are "missing.''
  
  
• All Yangtze-region couples with two daughters reported more than twice as many male as female births in 1989-90 when it came to baby No. 3, more than double the natural ratio of 104-106 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls.

* For couples with two daughters, the ratio shot up to 232 baby boys per 100 baby girls in 1989-90.

Other Facts

• Since 1996, 13 abandoned, dead babies have been found in dumpsters, duffle bags, and thrown over freeway embankments in Southern California.  (Source: Garden of Angels, Yucaipa, California)  
  
  
• More than 16 million baby girls in India are killed by their mothers or village midwives annually.

(Source: London Times)

  * Six million Chinese women are names "Lai Di," meaning "a son follows quickly." (Source: South China Morning Post)