Silences and moral narratives: infanticide as reproductive disruption

Infanticide is a widespread practice, yet few ethnographic and theoretical works examine this. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Indian Himalayas, I argue that infanticide is a form of reproductive disruption that elicits both public moral judgments and private silences. In this Himalayan context, the stigmas of abortion and premarital sex prevent community acknowledgement of infanticide and baby abandonment. Unmarried women hide their pregnancies, deliver and abandon their babies, and later are rushed to the hospital with postdelivery complications. While biomedical doctors deal with the debris of infanticide (postpartum hemorrhage), there is no formal accounting of the practice. I argue that by regarding infanticide as a form of reproductive disruption, we can open up women's narratives of pain and suffering that are silenced because of moral repugnance.