Filicide - A bleak post

Are humans losing their very basic parental instincts? I tried reading up on whether parental instincts are learned or inherited. Most scientists seem to lean towards genetic inheritance while some argue that it is learned from the parents. Looking at all the recent news I read, I am tempted to believe it is the latter. For example a very high percentage of pedophiles have been identified to have been or claim that they were abused as a child themselves. Most cases of parents who kill their own children seem to be born in poverty and drug abuse ridden households. They just never learned proper parental behavior. What they know of good parenting is only through secondary sources like media or someone outside the immediate family.

This article here gives some troubling statistics:

250 to 300 children are murdered by their parents each year in the U.S.

Homicide is the leading cause of death in children 4 and younger. Of children murdered before the age of 5, 61 percent were killed by parents

And

(It)is the third-leading cause of death in American children ages 5 to 14

I have heard and read of girl child infanticide in rural (and sometimes urban) India. But I have never heard of reports of Indian parents killing their children because the child was an inconvenience. I might be naive on this issue though. It just seems that such things are so frequent in the country I live. Is it just getting reported more here? How can a parent kill their own child. How sick must that mind be to be able to do that?

Evil of such calibre is just too tough to swallow. But swallow I must, as I read about all these ill-fated children, hit on the head, drowned in bathtubs, chopped up and thrown in the dumpsters, choked, spit on or thrown into rivers while strapped on to infant seats and even raped and killed. All at the hands of the person who brought them into this world. Because I am not an activist. Writing about them in this blog is the furthest I can go. And loving and protecting my daughter than my life itself. So glad Leo and I are passing on both the DNA and the lessons of parenting to her.

PS: Here is the article that triggered this post. http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/23/us/new-jersey-manhunt/index.html