Note 1004 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

This disproportion of the sexes in Oceanica is due to the murder of female infants, too early child-bearing, overwork, privation, licentiousness, and the violence of the men.1004 The imminence of famine dictates certain positive checks to population, among which infanticide and abortion are widespread in Oceanica. In some parts of the New Hebrides and the Solomon groups it is so habitual, that in some families all children are killed, and substitutes purchased at will.1005 In the well-tilled Fiji Islands, a pregnant girl is strangled and her seducer slain. The women make a practice of drinking medicated waters to produce sterility. Failing in this, the majority kill their children either before or after birth. In the island of Vanua Levu infanticide reaches from one-half to two-thirds of all children conceived; here it is reduced to a system and gives employment to professional murderers of babies, who hover like vultures over every child-bed. All destroyed after birth are females.1006 And yet here, as on many other islands of Melanesia and Polynesia, such offspring as are spared are treated with foolish fondness and indulgence.1007 The two facts are not incompatible.