Understanding infanticide in context: mothers who kill, 1870-1930 and today.

• Author: Oberman, Michelle
• Position: Chicago

INTRODUCTION

On July 29, 1911, the Chicago Tribune reported the story of a Miss Mary Stastch. An immigrant from Austria, Stastch was arrested in connection with the death of her three-week-old baby, which was found behind a residence in the city. The twenty-one-year-old mother stated that, after leaving the county hospital with her new-born, she wandered about Chicago for two days with the baby in her arms, seeking work. She could find nothing to do. On the afternoon of the third day, she claimed that the baby dropped from her arms. She grabbed the baby's bonnet string as it fell, which then pulled tightly around the baby's neck. She felt too weak to pick up the child immediately, and when she finally lifted it, she found that it was dead. Too poor to bury it, Miss Stastch carried the body to 1546 Carroll Avenue, where she abandoned it. (2)

For almost a decade, I have followed cases involving contemporary women in the United States who kill their children. Infanticide in our present society seems to be an anachronism, given our relative wealth and the widespread options for women seeking to avoid pregnancy or parenting. Cases like that of Miss Stastch belong to another era--one which seems as distant to us as the yellowing photos Miss Stastch might have carried with her from the old country. And yet, as I will explain in the course of this essay, in many important ways, her plight remains a contemporary one and is replicated day after day in cities and towns across this country.

The path to understanding the terrible crime of infanticide, both in bygone eras and in our own, lies in examining the circumstances that shape the lives and realities of mothers. To date, my research on infanticide has consisted of collecting stories from the media about mothers who kill their children, and fleshing them out as completely as possible by tracing their resolution through subsequent news stories, and also through the legal system. Occasionally, I have become involved in these cases as a scholar and a lawyer. In one instance, I interviewed and ultimately befriended a young woman accused and convicted of killing her newborn baby. In another case, I worked on a clemency petition and testified at a hearing on behalf of a woman serving a life sentence for killing her young child while suffering from postpartum psychosis.

Over the course of time, I have identified a distinct set of patterns in contemporary cases involving women who kill their children. In addition, my close examination of the circumstances surrounding these cases reveals a profound commonality that links these seemingly unrelated crimes. Specifically, infanticide may be seen as a response to the societal construction of and constraints on mothering.

The opportunity to juxtapose this contemporary vision of infanticide with the historical data arising out of the Chicago Homicide Database is helpful in several ways. First, this new historical data reveals several surprising shifts in the patterns of infanticide killings over the course of time. Second, it helps to lend perspective and clarity to the contemporary crime of infanticide. Finally, and most importantly, it provides powerful support to my earlier point: historically, as well as today, infanticide may be seen as a response to the societal construction of and constraints on mothering.

This essay begins with a brief overview of the patterned nature of contemporary infanticide cases in the United States. I then turn to the historical data, exploring both the striking similarities and the marked differences discovered when comparing today's cases with patterns of infanticide between 1870 and 1930. Finally, I consider the lessons we can glean from these cases in terms of the relationship between society, the structure of motherhood and the crime of infanticide.

1. PATTERNS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INFANTICIDE

   My contemporary research is compiled in a book I co-authored on infanticide, which draws on a database of 219 cases occurring between 1990 and 2000. (3) Of these cases, approximately seventeen percent involve babies who were killed within the first twenty-four hours of life, or "neonaticide" cases. (4) The other eighty-three percent involve the deaths of infants any time after the first twenty-four hours of life. I refer to these cases generically as "infanticide." I begin with a description of neonaticide.

   1. CONTEMPORARY NEONATICIDE

   An extraordinary number of cases involving mothers who kill their children occur within the first twenty-four hours of the child's birth. In medical circles, these cases are termed "neonaticides," and the patterns surrounding these cases are both remarkably consistent, and also quite distinct from those surrounding the infanticide deaths of older infants and children. (5)

   Women who commit neonaticide tend to be relatively young, and the overwhelming majority of these women are unmarried. (6) For example, although the ages of the women involved in the thirty-seven neonaticide cases included in our book ranged from fifteen to thirty-nine, the average age was nineteen. (7) All but one of these cases involved unmarried women, and the overwhelming majority of the men who fathered these infants were completely absent from the women's lives by the time they gave birth. (8)

   In addition to being isolated from their sexual partners, these women also were isolated from family and friends, fearing that disclosure of their pregnancy would jeopardize their already tenuous links to their support systems. Newspaper accounts often note the role played by fear in neonaticide cases. These fears include concerns such as getting kicked out of their parents' homes should their pregnancies be discovered, or being exposed as an undocumented person. (9) Financial insecurity also plays a role in these cases. In spite of the fact that the girls and women who commit neonaticide reflect the full range of socio-economic backgrounds, when one considers their personal financial resources, as distinct from those of their families, they are invariably quite vulnerable. (10) This factor is quite important because these women are so convinced that having a baby will jeopardize their current living situations.

   Women and girls who commit neonaticide tend to be exceedingly passive, and they respond to pregnancy with a combination of denial, wishful fantasy, and terror. (11) In short, they are paralyzed and unable to settle on a course of action for responding to their pregnancies. Instead, when interviewed later, they report that they spent their pregnancies living day to day, focusing on the banal details of their lives, and hoping that the pregnancy would simply disappear, or that someone else would notice their condition and take charge of the situation. (12) There is a striking absence of trusted confidants in the lives of these girls and women, adding credence to their perception that they have few resources or options to assist them in responding to this pregnancy. (13)

   An equally dramatic set of patterns surrounds the circumstances that lead to these infants' deaths. Virtually all neonaticide cases involve women who confuse the initial stages of labor with a need to defecate. They proceed to spend hours alone, most often on a toilet, often while others are present in their homes. They endure the full course of labor and delivery silently--a shocking feat given the typical noisiness of the birthing process. (14) After delivering their babies, the women's behavior ranges from exhaustion to panic. Many of these babies drown in the toilet, while the woman is either passed out, recuperating from childbirth, or in some cases, frantically cleaning the room. In some cases, the women suffocate or strangle the baby to prevent it from crying out. (15)

   Society responds to the crime of neonaticide in a surprisingly wide variety of manners. Despite the consistently harsh rhetoric of outrage that these cases generate, some juries and judges are quite lenient with these defendants. It is not unusual for those who investigate these cases to elect not to file criminal charges, or for women convicted of neonaticide to receive probation rather than a prison sentence. (16) Indeed, in many countries throughout the world infanticide laws specify that no charge higher than manslaughter may be brought against these women, and a probationary sentence, including mandatory counseling, is the standard response to these cases. (17) On the other hand, many of these women receive exceptionally harsh punishments and are forced to serve lengthy sentences for their crimes. (18)

   In a sense, the range of responses to neonaticide within the criminal justice system might reflect, or even stem from, the polarized debate over abortion in society at large. For those who see abortion as murder, the crime of neonaticide may be seen as the natural product of a culture that has embraced permissive sexual norms and legalized abortion. (19) It may be easier for those holding these views to condemn neonaticide in outright terms than it is for those who are supportive of a woman's right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

   Pro-choice views, however, can go both ways. On the one hand, those who are pro-choice may be inclined to condemn neonaticide in as harsh a manner as those who are anti-choice. Pro-choice advocates work hard to draw a bright line between fetuses and children, asserting that the latter, but not the former, are entitled to the full range of legal rights and protections. As the prolonged debate over "partial-birth" abortions demonstrates, any attempt to countenance the murder of born children would undermine that dichotomy, and threaten the ideological stance, as well as the actual coalition, of those who support legalized abortion. (20)

   On the other hand, pro-choice individuals are, by definition, more inclined to consider the circumstances surrounding a woman's pregnancy when weighing the moral wrong of abortion. As...