In two separate incidents this past week, newborn babies were brutally murdered by their own parents in India. In both cases, the babies escaped abortion but ended up facing similar violence after being born. Clearly, if human life is not respected inside the womb from the beginning, it can more easily be devalued immediately after birth and beyond.
North India: Newborn’s mother slit her throat
In one gruesome incident in north India, a mother killed her six-day-old daughter by slitting the child’s throat with her sharpened fingernails after a failed abortion attempt. The 27-year-old mother from Umbarde village near Thane was arrested on April 22nd after she confessed to the crime of killing her newborn daughter. Police were alerted by the doctor, who felt something was amiss when the mother came in with the bleeding child to be treated at the hospital — and a neighbor witnessed the crime.
According to The Indian Express, an officer from Khadakpada police station said “(the accused) had her hands around the baby’s neck while the newborn was bleeding. The child was taken to a private hospital but was declared dead.” Reportedly, “[the mother] didn’t want a third child and had borrowed money for an abortion. But her husband allegedly took the money and spent it on alcohol,” a source privy to the case said. “The mother accepted that she wanted to kill the child as she would have been an extra mouth to feed. She already has a son and a daughter.” (A different source states that the woman already had two daughters at home.)
Maharashtra, where the incident took place, is notorious in north India for abortion — especially sex-selective abortions. 102,398 abortions were committed in the Maharashtra government clinics in 2015, with 5,301 of those in Thane district, and this number doesn’t include illegal abortions or abortions committed in private clinics. Research reveals that a total of 15.6 million abortions were performed in India in 2015.
If we are bothered by a newborn child having her throat slit after birth, then we should also be bothered by this:
South India: Newborn’s parents trampled baby to death
The same week in another brutal incident in South India, a couple from Puthoor were arrested on Monday after killing their newborn baby just hours after birth. As reported by the Mumbai Mirror, “M (wife), 23, and her husband killed the newborn after her attempts to abort the foetus proved unsuccessful. The mother said that she took pills to abort the foetus, but it didn’t succeed.” Police Sub Inspector Deepu told the Mirror that “The baby’s ribs and all were found broken which almost reveals they murdered the baby by trampling.”
As the Mumbai Mirror reports, “The police claimed that the couple already has a two and half year old child and they didn’t want another child now.” There were measures for the couple to give the child safely to someone else, as the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare has the ‘Ammathottil’ in place. Ammathottil is a program similar to China and South Korea’s Drop Box or Safe Haven Law in the United States, where babies can be left anonymously rather than killed or thrown in the trash. These children are cared for and given in adoption to families who will love and cherish them.
READ: The heartbreaking consequences of abortion in China and India
Abortion is extremely violent and cruel. The fact that abortion leads to more violence and increased disregard for human life has been proven again and again. Those who support abortion often also support euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. As we see in these two tragic stories from India, a society that refuses to value all human lives equally gives rise to all manner of atrocity.
