Infanticide: Who's really responsible?

COMMENT "When the female (infant), buried alive, is questioned - for what crime she was killed?" (Al-Takwir 8-9). With these stirring words, the Qur’an brings the malicious destruction of infants to the fore of human civilisation. Malaysia is facing this crisis even now, 1,400 years after the advent of Divine revelation on this matter.

And the crisis seems to be increasing in severity. Every week there are yet more helpless infants abandoned in most cruel and barbaric ways. What is wrong with us? Have we learned nothing after 1,400 years? Are we still too stupid to fear the retribution of Allah’s wrath?

Neurological science has confirmed that the right brains of the newborn are already fully functional, so we cannot say these babies do not suffer their deaths horribly. So are we becoming baby-torturers as well?

Malaysia, like every civilised country, has adoption laws carefully designed to assign orphan children to loving parents who truly want them. And yet these laws cannot begin to cope with the demand for their implementation.

A young Indonesian servant comes forward in an advanced state of pregnancy, having slept with someone out of the insecurity of being both far from home and possibly illiterate as well. She cannot return home with an illegitimate child, nor can she find the means to support the child here in Malaysia. She must keep her present job for the sake of her existing children.

Therefore, many compassionate doctors in the private sector maintain secret lists of Malay families longing to adopt, but who are unwilling or unable to go through the complex and lengthy adoption proceedings. When one of these babies is born, such doctors feel his or her first duty is to the safety and sanctity of the newborn, and so sign the baby directly over to the willing Malay family on the birth certificate.

Except for the legalistic fact of genetic discrepancy, the future of the child is assured, the families are happy, and the hapless mother is forgiven the consequences of an indiscretion, caused by extremely un-Islamic conditions in the first place: that Muslim women are sent far from home to work, while their husbands remain tilling the village fields and contributing nothing to the support of the child.

Charge the parents?

And yet Star published about a year ago government statistics that 70 percent of illegitimate births in Kuala Lumpur are from Malay-Muslim girls. What does this tell us? A while back, there was some discussion about bringing criminal charges against parents of Malay kidnapped children. Do we do likewise with the parents of unwed mothers? No one would suggest that, yet blame must be assigned somewhere. Healing must be sought somewhere.

Let us call it defective fitrah (character). Parents are so out of touch with their own human nature, and thus their own children’s, that they have no idea whatsoever about the children’s secret ‘second lives’ – whether clubbing, drugs, or sex.

We once came across a pregnant Malay teenage girl sleeping in a certain train station. She had intended to return to her village to ask her parents to assist her childbirth. She was too ashamed to find any solution whatsoever to her problem.

What sort of parents did she have? Are we among the infamous pre-Islam tribals who murder their own daughters for embarrassing the family with so little as a kiss?

So in addition to adoption law reform, we desperately need guidance councillors to help families overcome dysfunctional communication. And these personnel must be competent and have proper understanding of the world view of Islam; not the secularists who now dominate the field.

In short, we need to heal the generation gap that has been appearing since the 1960s in the United States, more or less with the advent of the birth control pill that put the responsibility for unwanted pregnancy in the hands of the young women, rather than their errant boyfriends, and in fact helped invent “recreational sex”.

“Innovative” abortion?

And now, in the past few days, we have news of the true “abortion pill”. This is a child-murder pill, not an anti-conception pill. If a young woman has a positive pregnancy test after some weeks of missing her period, she may simply swallow one of these pills, and, voila! The baby is murdered in the womb and no one ever need know.

Do you think this abortion pill will not appear in Malaysia or other Muslim countries? Think again. These technologies cannot be stopped. The new abortion pill will be brought here and used. Or it will be sold over the Internet. And exactly how will the skills of our imams and Islamic scholars be put control the matter? What form will religious advice on the abortion pill take in our Friday sermons?

At present, we have no convincing answers to these questions. We are merely attempting, at some social risk perhaps, to raise the questions that our Muslim youth are now facing, about which we know nothing from our own experience in the dark ages of our pre-technological past.

When similar issues arose in the 1960s in America, the majority of parents of these teenagers simply abdicated. They literally threw their daughters out of the house. It was the American equivalent of ‘honour killing’. It resulted in the hippy generation, where these young people had to form their own communes because they had no families of their own.

Here in Malaysia, we now have thousands of ‘clubbers’ – Malay-Muslim youth who congregate each night in the clubs of KL, drink, take drugs, dance all night and have sex. They also have no homes to return to.

Are Malay-Muslim parents abdicating? And do we charge them with criminal child neglect? The grandchildren of these Malay-Muslim parents may, in fact, be murdered, through neglect of communication or religious responsibility. As of now, babies in their own daughters’ wombs may be aborted instantly, not even thrown in the garbage dumps any more.

 

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AZRIL MOHD AMIN is a lawyer and one of founding directors of recently established think tank Islamic Strategic Studies Initiative (ISSI-Malaysia). He is former vice-president of the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (Abim) and current vice-president of the Muslim Lawyers Association.