Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome is presented as a place where infanticide was not merely a private or occasional act: the exposure of newborns was a familiar practice, and for centuries the law allowed fathers considerable power over their offspring. The account connects that practice to family resources, the status of girls, and the ease with which unwanted infants could be abandoned.

Exposure and Family Economy

In Ancient Rome, a family seeking to adopt a baby could go to a rubbish dump, where newborns had been left; with luck, an infant might still be alive. The detail makes exposure more than an abstract legal custom: abandonment created a grim, informal route by which some unwanted children could enter another household, even as their survival was uncertain.

The book places this practice within a longer history in which infanticide served as a means of birth control before reliable contraception was available. It contrasts exposure with abortion, which it describes as a dangerous procedure for mothers well into the twentieth century. In this account, leaving a newborn was treated as a way to avoid the risks of abortion, while transferring the danger onto the infant.

Law and Paternal Authority

The account describes infanticide in Ancient Rome as both customary and legally protected before the arrival of Christianity. The Paterfamilias's Power over Children under the Twelve Tables explicitly allowed a father to rid himself of offspring born with defects. This legal authority placed decisions about a child’s survival within the power of the household patriarch.

The text also identifies poverty, unwillingness to raise a child, and the birth of a girl as circumstances in which infanticide was commonplace through the fourth century. It recalls a merchant’s instruction to his pregnant wife to dispose of a daughter if the child was female, illustrating how the rejection of girls could be framed as an ordinary domestic decision. The example connects the law’s protection of paternal authority with a wider devaluation of children, particularly daughters.

From Accepted Practice to Homicide

The book marks the spread of Christianity as a turning point in the legal and moral understanding of infanticide. The first Christian Roman emperor rejected the practice, and after his death the idea that killing a child constituted homicide began to take hold. The change is presented not as an immediate disappearance of the practice, but as a shift in the principle by which it was judged: a child could no longer be treated simply as the father’s property or as a life a household might discard.

Ancient Rome therefore anchors the book’s historical account of how the same act could move between accepted household power and criminal killing. Its examples of exposure, paternal authority, and the rejection of daughters show how law and custom could make infant survival dependent on a family’s decisions, before a new legal understanding began to challenge that power.