Infanticide

The Yanomami people have practiced in the acts of infanticide which is when the parents, usually the mothers, will kill their babies or abandon them to die. There isn't any specific pattern as to why they do this besides that the families prefer a male over a female or the child has physical or mental handicaps. This dips into the idea of gender roles obviously showing how the Yanomami people look to the men more than they do to the women.

Most young mothers, usually in their early twenties, are pressured to kill a newborn girl if they already have a lot of female children. The mothers don't have much control over the decision making, and it is ultimately up to the husband whether a newborn should be killed or not.

How they actually practice infanticide depends. Often they'll kill the baby at the birthing site by choking them, but they also leave the babies in the woods to die, and one case in the 50's according to John F. Peters, missionaries had found a baby had been thrown into the river.

Since the Yanomami believe that the males are more important than the females, if a mother had twins they'd choose the male, and if both were male, they'd choose the stronger of two.

Peters, John F. Life Among the Yanomami: The Story of Change Among the Xilixana on the Mucajai River in Brazil. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.