women in this Arab society had no status and no rights. Among them it
was thought honourable to put baby girls to death. It is
a mistake, however, to think that infanticide was
practised on a country-wide scale. Such a dangerous
institution could not flourish throughout a country.
That would have meant the extinction of the race. The
truth is that in Arabia—or for that matter in India or
any other country where infanticide has ever existed, it
has been confined only to certain families. The Arab
families who practised it either had an exaggerated
notion of their social status or they were constrained in
other ways. Possibly they were unable to find suitable
young men for their daughters to marry; knowing this,
they put to death their baby girls. The evil of this
institution lies in its savageness and its cruelty, not in
the results which it has in terms of a nation's
population. Different methods were used for killing baby
girls, among them burying alive and strangulation.