For the layperson no crime is more difficult to comprehend than the killing of a child by his or her own parents. This is a retrospective study of neonaticide and infanticide in Eastern Croatia from 1980 to 2004. Judicial records of infanticide cases stored in Regional and County Courts were analyzed for the circumstances surrounding the offense. Twenty-four babies were discovered in various pl...

This article analyzes infanticide based on the Coroners' Records for Providence County, Rhode Island, from the 1870s to 1938 to determine doctors' and coroners' attitudes toward mothers who killed. The nineteenth century witnessed a medical discourse on the possibility of postpartum insanity as a cause of infanticide. While some women claimed temporary insanity, and some doctors and coroners le...

Previous study of infant burials has suggested that infanticide was routinely practised during the Roman period in Britain. This, together with the observation that there is an adult sex imbalance in favour of males at many Romano-British cemetery sites, has raised the question of female infanticide. We attempted to investigate this possibility by identifying sex in some infant skeletons from R...

I argue that David Boonin has failed in his attempt to undermine Donald Marquis's future-like-ours argument against abortion. I show that the ethical principle advanced by Boonin in his critique to that argument is unable, contrary to what he claims, to account for the wrongness of infanticide. Then I argue that Boonin's critique misrepresents Marquis's argument. Although there is a way to rest...

Two instances of infanticide and cannibalism in polar bears (Ursus maritimus) were observed in SE Svalbard, at Hopen Island. In the first, an adult male killed three young cubs at a den site and consumed one of them. In the second, an adult male actively pursued, killed, and consumed a dependent yearling. Infanticide of dependent polar bear offspring by adult males may be more common in Svalbar...

Infanticide is a horrendous crime universally condemned from all ethical, juridical and moral standpoints. However, legislation on infanticide foresees mitigating circumstances for infanticidal mothers, with sentences by far disproportionate to the severity of the crime. The main justification for this abstaining from severe punishments has been the so-called post puerperal psychosis, whose dia...

This article aims to explain why the notion of mania puerperalis, or puerperal insanity, was not used in the Netherlands to exonerate women accused of infanticide, in contrast to other countries. It applies the concept of ‘travelling knowledge’ as an approach to the history of forensic medicine, pointing to the fields of medicine and law as contact zones inviting, promoting or barring the trans...

Infanticide and offspring cannibalism are taxonomically widespread phenomena. In some group-living species, a new dominant individual taking over a group can benefit from infanticide if doing so induces potential mates to become reproductively available sooner. Despite widespread observations of infanticide (i.e. egg cannibalism) among fishes, no study has investigated whether egg cannibalism o...

Paternal behavior is not innate but arises through social experience. After mating and becoming fathers, male mice change their behavior toward pups from infanticide to paternal care. However, the precise brain areas and circuit mechanisms connecting these social behaviors are largely unknown. Here we demonstrated that the c-Fos expression pattern in the four nuclei of the preoptic-bed nuclei o...