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Infanticide or "Post-natal Abortion"
Infanticide is a problem that is becoming
an epidemic. According to Patricia Pearson, in her book When She Was Bad (Random
House of Canada, also available from Viking), it is "The Problem That Still Has No
Name." That is the title of a chapter in her book that concerns itself with the issue
of child murder. It is a problem that we don't hear much about, unless particularly
gruesome instances of it occur instances involving blood, broken bones, torture
and if somebody is sufficiently bothered to take a close look into the possibility
that violence or other willful acts were the cause of the death of a child. At the opening of this chapter of her book, Patricia Pearson shows the
following two quotes:
With regard to the public, [infanticide] causes no alarm, because it is a crime
which can be committed only by mothers upon their newly born children.
SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, eighteenth-century jurist
The power of the mother ... is to give or withhold survival itself.
ADRIENNE RICH, twentieth-century writer
Infanticide, a word that became part of our language in about 1656, a
crime that is reported in the New Testament, although it is not called infanticide there
in that case it involved the murder of all male children aged one year or younger
in the town of Bethlehem. It was done by the soldiers of Herode and therefore remembered
well it was done by men.
Infanticide, a euphemism for the murder of children.
In 1922, in England, the crime of murder was reduced to manslaughter, for
murderers of victims that had not yet reached more than the age of one to two days. It is
intriguing to consider the reasons given in arguments for leniency toward women who kill
their children: Hormonal imbalance due to breast feeding; Failure to recover from the
effects of giving birth to "such children".
Patricia Pearson says this:
In England, support for hormones as the cause of all maternal aggression
against infants is enshrined in the law. In 1922, parliament introduced the Infanticide
Act, which reduced the crime automatically from murder to manslaughter on the basis of
insanity if a mother "had not fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to such
child, but by reason thereof the balance of her mind was then disturbed." The point
of the Infanticide Act was not that British doctors had suddenly discovered a link between
postpartum hormones and violent behavior. To this day that link hasn't been categorically
established. The point was to rid the courts of the necessity of imposing murder
sentences, since juries had been refusing to convict women when the penalty was execution.
For instance, following five thousand coroner's inquests into child deaths held annually
in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, only thirty-nine convictions for child murder
resulted, and none of those women were executed. Similarly, in Canada, when a
mandatory death penalty applied to the murder of children, "courts regularly returned
'not guilty' verdicts in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary." [p. 80] |
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It appears that at about the same time as women were given the right to
vote, they were also given the benefit of being not accountable for their actions by
reason of insanity due to hormonal imbalance. That was just a first step. The age of the children who became victims of
child murder within the definition of "infanticide" was extended to one year,
from the previously "acceptable" one to two days. Patricia Pearson says:
In 1938, Britain revised its infanticide statute, extending the age of
victims from "newly born" to "under the age of 12 months." To justify
this extension, the revised statute cited "the effect of lactation" on a woman's
mind. It was decided, in effect, that breastfeeding could drive women mad. The
experts who proposed the revision to the courts privately believed that social and
psychological factors were more critical than biology. Studies consistently show,
for example, that preexisting histories of depression and life stress are a common
denominator in women with postpartum mental disorders. But psychiatrist J. H. Morton
defended the diagnosis of "lactational insanity" as being acceptable to
conservative judges and barristers. It was never proposed that the Infanticide Act
forgive mothers for killing older children, spouses or others, even while said to be
suffering from the same insanity. [p. 80] |
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Yet, that is exactly what is increasingly and routinely happening
today. Mothers are considered inculpable fathers not when they murder
their children. In the Latimer case in Saskatchewan, which is currently awaiting
sentencing after appeals, the father who killed his daughter who was severely afflicted by
cerebral palsy faces a minimum sentence of 10 years. The mother in Montreal, who killed
her 6 ½-year-old son, similarly although less severely
afflicted with autism (he was able to attend school), by drowning him in a bathtub,
received a suspended sentence of two years, less one day, with mandatory psychological
counselling for a while. (see
comparison of the two cases)
On December 20th, 1985, Marybeth Tinning in Schenectady, New York,
murdered the last of her nine children, a four-week-old baby girl Tami Lynn. The others,
aged from a few weeks to five years, were killed by her over the preceding 14 years. The
cause of all deaths had been diagnosed as SIDS. The community members had began to wonder
after the sixth child died. Not until the ninth death happened were charges laid. I don't
know what the sentence was in her case, but it appears that Marybeth Tinnings was
imprisoned. The point here is not whether a murderer should or should not have been
sentenced. The point is that nine children died because society felt that their mother, a
well-respected woman who received much sympathy for her "losses," was an
angel. The murders of at least eight children could have been prevented in her case,
if, after the first murder had been committed, the mother would have been suspected of
perpetrating it. However, eight more children were murdered by this
"mother" before she did come under suspicion. Unfortunately, that's
something that happens very often.
Here are a few more excerpts from When She Was Bad:
In recent years, academics have tried to uncover MSBP rates by tracking
cases of confirmed abuse or death in children and then researching the fates of their
sisters and brothers. Dr. Roy Meadow, a professor of pediatrics at St. James University
Hospital, Leeds, England, who coined the phrase
Munchausen syndrome by proxy, reported in
1990 that of twenty-seven children who had been suffocated by their mothers, he'd found
eighteen siblings who had died "suddenly and unexpectedly in early life." Three
similar studies found high rates of unexplained sibling demise. Chicago, which has one of
the highest unexpected infant death rates in the world, was the subject of a 1985 study by
the Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. Twenty-two percent of the crib deaths recorded
in a two-year period, the committee found, "were related to suspected child abuse and
neglect." Though not all of the suspicious Chicago cases were the result of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the data reveal how easy it is to harm children, and
particularly babies, without falling 'Under suspicion. |
According to Dr. John Emery, testifying at Marybeth Tinning's trial, the
term sudden infant death syndrome was coined at the turn of the century in the state of
Washington. "As deaths due to what you might call classic disease such as pneumonia
disappeared," Emery explained, "relatively larger numbers of children died
unexpectedly ... at home instead of at hospital." Without any obvious or medically
understood cause of death, parents became suspects in neglect, either for "sleeping
on top of them, or being drunk or disorderly." A group of Seattle doctors "said
let us, as it were, invent a term which could be used to describe babies that are found
unexpectedly dead, and we will say that this is a natural cause of death so these parents
shall not be harassed. Eventually they called it sudden infant death syndrome, and this
had a very fine effect." [my emphasis WHS] |
As with postpartum psychosis, SIDS is not always the wrong conclusion to
draw, insofar as there quite clearly are breathing and metabolic disorders in some infants
that cause sudden death. In some cases, the problem may be a subtle neurological
malformation affecting respiratory control; in others, a respiratory infection. Smoking
during pregnancy increases the risk of SIDS. So does premature birth. Babies are also
vulnerable to suffocation when lying face down on bunched bed clothes, because they don't
have the strength to lift their faces. The peak risk age is between two and four months,
with 90 percent of SIDS deaths taking place before six months. Natural infant deaths are
not a fiction. SIDS itself is not necessarily a misnomer. The problem is that it's become
a catch-all explanation, used when autopsies show no clear cause of death. Coroners tend
to apply the label indiscriminately. In 1995, two babies in the Boston area who suffocated
in battery-operated cradles were listed as SIDS cases without death scene investigations.
Another eight babies died before any connection was made to the design of the cradle. |
Death by smothering is virtually indistinguishable from SIDS at autopsy.
If medical examiners don't seek out clues at the death scene, as they do for all
suspicious adult deaths, then it's not difficult to see how infanticides by smothering are
overlooked. Police investigators and academics guess that 10 to 20 percent of the six
thousand to eight thousand SIDS cases reported each year in the United States conceal
accidental or deliberate suffocation. "I remember handling all the deaths, and you'd
get a lot of crib deaths," recalls detective Leroy Orozco. "We had one where one
gal's baby died, then several months later, another one. We thought, this gal could
suffocate her kids and we'd never know it." [pp. 107-109] |
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Update 2003 05 23
Infanticide "SIDS" in Australia; four children killed in one family
Proving that women who kill no more than one of their infants get away with murder,
Kathleen Folbigg raised the suspicion of the authorities only after she had killed her
fourth child of her four children she had killed, a 19-month-old baby girl.
Mind, you, if her husband would not have found her diary, she would have
gotten away with murdering that child, too. (Full
Story)
Are we now becoming more "civilized and humane," and will our
children be allowed to be less at risk of losing their lives, and instead permitted to
grow up? Judge for yourself. Here is what one expert says:
"This was found on 3 Nov. 1997 in the [Usenet] discussion group
<alt.dads-rights.unmoderated>:
According to Steven Pinker's articles in today's New York Times Magazine, the tendency
for some young women to kill one-day-old infants (neonaticide) may be built into "the
biological design of our parental emotions."
Neolithic women might have decided to cut their losses early on and let sickly
infants, or those not promising to make it to adulthood, die rather than waste their time
raising it. Such women mentally dealt with the decision as an unavoidable tragedy, but one
necessary at the time.
After a lengthy discussion of the topic the author concludes with the inference that
society will become more merciful to those teenagers who dump their kids in garbage cans
once society understands why "the anguished girls" felt they had no choice but
to do what they did.
Jack Garbuz <JGARBUZ@worldnet.att.net>
The following links to a detailed and disturbing discussion from the Wash Post of Nov.
6 [1998] in which Pinker's "infanticide" is given a much more cold-blooded
meaning than the usual "excuse the mother because of post-natal depression, hormones
etc.". It significantly extends abortion to include the new-born whose continued life
will depend solely on a "rational" decision by the mother.
http://www.prolife.org/rvw/infanticide.html
[That link is now dead, but copies of the article "Why They Kill Their Newborns",
originally published November 2, 1997 New York Times Magazine, can still be
accessed on the Net.
Robert L. Morrison provides an
excellent discussion of the circumstances and consequences of Steven Pinkers
proposition. WHS]
Mark |
Update 2003 07 12
WorldNetDaily
Peter Singer, a promoter of infanticide and a professor of bioethics at Princeton
University has been given the 2003 World Technology Award for Ethics by the World
Technology Network.
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33531
Can a similar award for Steven Pinker be far behind?
How much longer until mothers who kill their children receive not sentences but
medals? |
See also:
- DVStats.org — a search engine,
aggregating research that examines the impact and extent of domestic
violence upon male victims. (Off-site)
This search facility equates domestic violence to intimate partner
violence
between men and women in relationships. It does not provide
information on violence between homosexuals, siblings or violence
against family members other than heterosexual partners and spouses,
such as infanticide, child abuse or violence against elderly in
families.
__________________
Updates:
1999 10 12
2000 05 09 (to install search engine)
2001 02 04 (format changes)
2003 05 23 (added reference to "SIDS" murders in
Australia)
2003 07 12 (added reference to bioethics award for Peter
Singer) |
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