The Nazirite Vow

Many years ago I heard a story that moved me a lot. I met a young woman who had been in the Peace Corps, or something like that, in the Solomon Islands, which is a little cluster of six islands to the east of Papua New Guinea. Apparently the food supply there was limited, and so the population needed to be limited too. And so it would happen occasionally that a woman would give birth to twins, and one or another of the parents would need to commit infanticide. The grieving parent might then take on a private fast — say she would not eat papayas — as she lived through the grief of the death of this child.