A curious article

I just found out that my entry for the "Encyclopedia of Infanticide" was accepted. My entry focused on Infanticide during Choson Korea (1392-1910). Though a disturbing subject, I've always been intrigued by it after studying it for a class on Japanese history. In Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) the population became very urbanized (more so than the England of that time) and infanticide became common enough to significantly affect the population (instead of growing it leveled off). Curiously this was largely not from poor people committing infanticide but from urban middle and upper class people doing so who wanted to maintain their status.

I thought I would just be able to summarize some articles for my entry but it turned out that no one has really written on this subject in Korea. When I asked around I was told that it was because Korea was an agricultural country so infanticide was not that common. In addition, the Korean government didn't keep the kind of records that Japan did and so it's hard to measure. However, there was a constant cycle of population growth-disease/famine-population loss which indicates that what infanticide there was did not significantly affect population growth.

I ended up basing my entry mostly on primary source detail from the court records. One was really odd because it was an attempted infanticide. How many attempted infanticides are there; infants can't defend themselves. In this case it seems like the woman, the wife of a slave (so actually probably lower than a slave) went crazy because she couldn't feed her child and tried to kill the infant. The neighbors apparently witnessed her doing this or heard it and stopped her. So she must have done it spontaneously. When asked why she said she had been begging and didn't have any way to feed the child. The officials debated over what to do with her. Some wanted to punish her harshly because what she had done was against nature ("Parents should love their children.") Others said the fact that it was against nature was proof itself that she had been driven by cold and hunger and that doing such a thing was not her "original intention". So they ended up just banishing her. Then, a few years later the people in banishment were in danger of starving and so they released her. The legal system in Korea is really interesting because the highest officials in the land had to make a lot of these decisions (no one could be exeucted without the king's permission).

This case seems to have led to a devate over what the punishment for parents who murder their children should be. Some wanted the death penalty. Others said no because children who killed parents were already punished with execution and punishing them in the same way would have blurred the lines between superior and inferior! It was the latter view that won. In pre-modern Korea it was very important to discrminate based on hierarhcy.

I hope to expand this research some time after I finish my dissertation. The Catholic missionaries in the 19th century received funds from a France-based organization that had the mission of baptizing abandoned babies and seeing that the ones who survived were raised as Catholics. I wonder if they kept records on how many babies they baptized. I think abandonment would have been a lot more common than infanticide. Unfortunately I can't read French (yet!). Maybe in a few years I can pursue this.