A story posted by the Times reveals that women in a very remote area of Papua New Guinea claim they kill their sons at birth to reduce the number of men available to battle:
In a chilling echo of Herod’s massacre of the innocents, Rona Luke and Kipiyona Belas said the women smothered their sons at birth to force an end to the tribal conflicts.
“All the women folk agreed to have all male babies born killed because they have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them,” they said.
It should be noted that the remoteness of the area in question is apparently one of the reasons for the extreme measures, and perhaps also why they are considered to be effective by the women. Otherwise one would assume that men would be drafted or drift in from neighboring regions.
How could mothers do such a thing, especially when the maternal instinct to love and nurture is so strong. It seems that in the absence of a traditional and/or religious modern framework of ethical social and human behavior, the mothers felt more justified in preventing themselves from suffering further misery due to inter-tribal warfare. Things must have been so terrible for them to resort to such an extreme measure that their collective logic became twisted as demonstrated by the holocaust perpetrators. Of course, what happened in Papa New Guinea cannot be compared to this and occurred on a much smaller, localized scale, but those women obviously failed to see the long-term consequences of their actions. Certainly, these women must have truly felt their intentions were good that they were willing to sacrifice the life of their newborns (and quite likely some women felt pressured to conform to the group to maintain a stronger sense of peace and community and which is paramount to primitive societies) This begs me to ask, “Did those women’s actions make them bad people?” which leads to a whole other philosophical debate.