Posted on 02/26/2008 7:37:36 AM PST by jdm
The rate of infanticide in Germany varies widely between the regions of the former West Germany and East Germany. Der Spiegel reports that the issue has become a political hot potato, and that the suggestion by the governor of the formerly communist-run state Saxony-Anhalt that communism could be the cause has people demanding his resignation:
Wolfgang Böhmer, governor of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, faces opposition calls to resign after he said women in the east had "a more casual approach to new life" than in the west.
Böhmer, who trained as a gynaecologist, was responding to research showing that the risk of a baby being killed by its mother is three to four times higher in the east than it is in the west of Germany.
Barely a month goes by in Germany without media reports of infanticide. One of the most shocking cases (more...) was that of Sabine Hilschinz, 42, from the eastern city of Frankfurt an der Oder, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2006 for killing eight of her babies. She is seeking to have the ruling overturned in an appeal that started this month.
"Statistics don't necessarily imply a causal link," Böhmer told the German newsmagazine Focus in an interview published on Monday. "But the accumulation cannot be denied. I think it can mainly be explained with a more casual approach to new life in eastern Germany." In the German Democratic Republic abortion right up to the 12th week was allowed in 1972. The women took the decision on their own. Today, to obtain an abortion at that late stage, women are required to receive a professional consultation.
Bohmer blamed the "widespread fixation on the state" for cheapening human lives. It could also have been the actual application of communism by Soviet and East German leaders that contributed to that as well. Joseph Stalin killed millions through deliberate starvation, bloody purges, and internal fights; East Germany's leaders had just as few scruples if lower body counts.
Communism as a system devalues the individual. It reduces their worth to simple calculations of productivity. By eliminated the foundations of liberty as an innate part of humanity as a vestige of the divine within us, Communism made the state divine instead, and the people within it merely producers. In that kind of oppressive system, the dispirited will see babies as little more that exo-fetuses.
The reaction to Bohmer shows that Germany still has unification issues almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The forty-five year split of the country created very different cultures across the divide, and it left the Germans in the East poor, defensive, and wary. If Bohmer faces this much grief over pointing out the obvious cultural effects of Communism even with this evidence in support, then the country may need another generation to fully heal.
I sat near some East Germans on a train a few years back, and it was interesting to note how different their German sounded than what I was used to from West Germans.
It takes a different kind of woman to give birth to a child and then say.....’Oh, never mind’...
Europe has become a real pit.
What I find interesting is that the author cited Stalin’s purges, but failed to mention the Nazi Holocaust .
.. you are completely right - if we don’t get a grip on this we will be on the same level of infanticides per head as in the United States in some 10 or 20 years.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/children.htm
estimate per head rates by assuming 300 million US americans vs. 80 million germans.
Infanticides in germany: 900 over 10 years.
Infantivides in the US : 500 per year.
Rate in the US is declining since 1995
The younger the children are the more they get a victim of infanticide (in the US - don’t know for germany)
In the US you got 1.4 million abortions per year
In germany we got 0.12 millions
I am sitting in McDonald’s as I write this with two Christian college students. They were students of mine in a Biblical Worldview class I taught a couple of years ago. What an excellent opportunity to discuss the implications of one’s worldview on how one lives. This is classic Marxism being lived out before our eyes.
Good stats. Well, I mean the stats are bad, but your research is good. It’s a pervasive problem, and the US is right in the middle of it.
I just don’t like the ‘Communism devalues the individual’ excuse. How would one explain infanticides in the US? I don’t know how one can explain the reason for infanticide ANYWHERE.
Well that’s a catch - if you try to anaylse that crime to prevent it (can’t put an officer next to all craddles) then you have to understand the perpetrators - that’s (hopefully) not excusing them.
It’s granted that some people fall in love with the perpetrators while they try to understand them and forget about the victims alltogether - that’s a risk lying in the nature of understanding crime I guess.
er... Perhaps because the Nazi Holocaust cannot account for differences in infanticide between east and west Germany? Are you even aware of what the article was about?
This is the paragraph I was referring to:
Bohmer blamed the "widespread fixation on the state" for cheapening human lives. It could also have been the actual application of communism by Soviet and East German leaders that contributed to that as well. Joseph Stalin killed millions through deliberate starvation, bloody purges, and internal fights; East Germany's leaders had just as few scruples if lower body counts.
Would you like me to explain what that means? Maybe then you could see why I made the comment I did.
Alas, not only does communism/socialism “devalue the individual”, it also produces societies with large numbers of sociopaths and psychopaths and it can indeed take generations for a society to unlearn these destructive behavioral patterns.
The high rate of infanticide in the US is due to the socialistic nature of our own government. A government doesn’t have to be full blown communist in order to screw up it’s citizens. The socialist, welfare, nanny state in the US produces plenty of it’s own sociopaths and psychopaths.
Finally, as to why sociopaths and psychopaths kill their children? It’s because they are crazy. Some ideologies do create mentally unbalanced people. Socialism is one of them.
The unspoken irony here is that all these socialistic euro countries have much greater restrictions on abortion than we do. Late-term abortion is forbidden in quite a few unlikely places.
Thanks to Doe vs. Bolton (decided on the same day as Roe vs. Wade but never referred to by the usual suspects) The U.S. has virtually unlimited abortion.
>>Some ideologies do create mentally unbalanced people. Socialism is one of them.<<
I suppose so. In all reality, how much does this really differ from abortion? We have a culture of death and all that it entails.
I know what that means. It means that while east Germany had to endure Communism, west Germany didn’t. It helps explain why infanticides are higher in east Germany than they are in west Germany. Please explain how the Nazi holocaust could cause infanticides to be higher in east Germany than they are in west Germany.
Complete indifference to human life is one of the legacies of Communism. This makes perfect sense.
I give up—I see it—you don’t—so there’s no more to say.
Only about 1/4 of the children under five deaths in the US are at the mother’s hand. Are you including all under-five deaths in your German stats, Rummenigge?
One thing that greatly stands out between the US and Germany is how few pregnancies there are in Germany, per capita. The US has about five times the population of Germany, but ten times the numbers of abortions—but the percentages of pregnancies that result in abortion is much less in Germany. Therefore, there are fewer pregnancies in Germany, per capita...whether ending in abortion or not.
Complete indifference to human life is one of the legacies of Communism. This makes perfect sense.
******************************************************
It sure is ,, Bohmer is 100% correct... as a former Gyno in East Germany he knows that infanticide was a part of the national health care system and that it was tolerated there for 50 years... Does anyone here dispute that the wonderful statistics on fetal deaths (or rather the lack thereof) and abnormalities put forth by the Communists were a result of abortion and infanticide if the child was imperfect and would put a strain on their hospital system.. Do you really think that a health care system that couldn’t afford antibiotics or the cost of the simplest lab tests had half the fetal/infant mortality rate we had here.. Of course infanticide is related to the remnants of Communism.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.