Today’s materialistic world has changed all that. There is hardly a day without some report in the newspaper about children being abused or abandoned by their own mothers. Children are battered, maimed, and brutalized by parents or guardians. Even toddlers are not spared. Some of them are battered to death by their parents in fits of anger and frustration.

Sometimes a mother, out of frustration, would decide to throw her children out of the flat window or to poison them with weed killer before committing suicide herself. This is wrong. No one has the right to kill herself, much less another, even if the motive is love. We hear of infants being abandoned by their parents and discarded at road junctions or rubbish dumps..

It may be noted that only the human species would abandon their helpless babies for selfish reasons. This deed is below what an animal would perform to its young offspring. Therefore, while we take pride in our beauty, intelligence, physical skills and technological achievements, at times we descend lower than the lowest of animals.