I don’t think that word “identical” means what you think it means.

P.S. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American couples who are trying to adopt but are blocked by the lunatics in Social Services departments all over the country. They would love to have the opportunity to adopt a Brazilian child.

However these days millennial students are not so quick to condemn the town’s “custom” just as they are reluctant to condemn female genital mutilation in cultures which practice that.

While it is true that these tribes live in Brazil, they are essentially autonomous. Out of both choice and logistical necessity, the government long ago decided to let these tribes maintain their traditional lifeways, including no doubt, many practices that are barbaric. How many tribes still display their enemies heads on pikes?

Since these tribes are living as hunters and gatherers in a harsh and unforgiving environment with little or no contact with the national government, the practices they developed to deal with their situation are still relevant. They simply do not have the luxury of keeping around people with disabilities, who consume resources but cannot contribute to the tribe’s wellbeing.

Someone mentioned above that the tribes should simply hand over their unwanted children to the state, but Brazil’s orphanages and slums are already overflowing with unwanted and feral children. There is almost no chance of adoption for any of them, particularly those who are defective in some way.

It seems to me that Brazil faces a choice here: Either leave the tribes alone and let them do what they will in all its savagery, or forget protecting their lifeways and try to assimilate them. They can’t really be lukewarm about this.

My understanding is that abortion is only legal in cases of rape and if it’s the only way to save the life of the mother.

The practice of killing “the disabled, the children of single mothers, and twins” are in place because culturally it was REALLY hard to feed everyone. These were the least likely to survive anyway. Tough life means tough choices. Just because it’s been a millennia or so since such choices were faced by your ancestor doesn’t mean that others are exempt from such choices.

Cultural norms evolve for a reason. In this case such norms that in the well-fed West we consider abhorrent. In other places they’re called survival

Generally in the west we have decided that the ‘white man’s burden’ and forcibly imposing our way of life on indigenous people is a bad thing. And indeed often it has been, and certainly it has been done it bad ways.

The thing is, without our culture and way of life and the immense wealth that it has generated (i’m not talking about just 21st century wealth, but even enlightenment era wealth was immense to what came before) some of the things that we hold as necessary are simply unaffordable.

For poor hunter gatherer tribes, that can at times include keeping your kids alive. If trying to do so would just mean that more would die, then choosing to kill one, so the others have a chance, might be the best of bad choices.

Basically, this means it comes down to three choices.

1) Force these tribes into the modern world.
2) Let them remain primitive with all that entails.
3) Somehow substitute them killing their children with instead giving them to others to raise (this has monetary costs and even in America children in ‘the system’ end up abused)

Like the primitive tribesmen it seems to me we don’t really have a good and easy choice here, it is pretty easy to just these hunter gatherers as being ‘barbaric’ but I think it harder to create a solution.