Alas, a Blog

Dawn Eden asks “if a woman feels no instinctive maternal love towards her child, can she be called psychologically healthy? Or is the complete lack of instinctive maternal love a sign of mental illness?”

Stephen Pinker, in The New York Times Magazine eight years ago, argued that killing a newborn, while wrong, was not a sign of mental illness:

It’s hard to maintain that neonaticide is an illness when we learn that it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history. And that neonaticidal women do not commonly show signs of psychopathology. In a classic 1970 study of statistics of child killing, a psychiatrist, Phillip Resnick, found that mothers who kill their older children are frequently psychotic, depressed or suicidal, but mothers who kill their newborns are usually not. (It was this difference that led Resnick to argue that the category infanticide be split into neonaticide, the killing of a baby on the day of its birth, and filicide, the killing of a child older than one day. )

Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sickness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropogist who has studied motherhood cross-culturally, argues for the “motherhood is learned behavior” view:

Mother love is not universal. The idealization of women as natural loving mothers is a cultural belief that gets us into trouble. “We should detach from the idea of universal motherhood as natural and see it as a social response,” [anthropologist] Nancy Scheper-Hughes says. Women in jail reported that no-one believed them when they said they wanted to kill their children. “There’s a collective denial even when mothers come right out and say “I really shouldn’t be trusted with my kids.”

Neonaticide is more common than most people imagine, and it appears to be something done in every culture. It tends to happen when young mothers feel that they are isolated and have nowhere to turn. From Michelle Oberman’s very thorough article “Understanding Infanticide In Context“:

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. n9 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. n10 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Oberman’s article is especially interesting because as well as looking at contemporary infant deaths, she also studied infanticides from 1870-1930 in Chicago in some detail, and found many of the same patterns applied back then. (Although others do not: maternal homicide/suicide has become much less common over the decades, for example).

If the mother feels isolated, that can be deadly:

A mother’s sense of isolation [is] arguably the most deadly enemy of the mother-child bond, according to both Meyer and Hrdy.

In a society where work and adult social outlets tend to be outside the home, stay-home motherhood can be a sentence to solitary confinement for those who lack a support network.

This is a relatively new and, for some, a tragic development, according to Michelle Oberman, co-author of Mothers Who Kill: “For the past 30 years or so, unlike any other point in human history, mothers of newborns tend to spend long hours alone with their infants, unaccompanied by family, friends and neighbours.”

It is a recipe for disaster when the mother is emotionally unstable, she says: In the majority of the cases she and Meyer studied, “the (children’s) deaths were at least in part the result of maternal isolation.”

I remember reading a article in some online newsweekly, in which several new mothers who were distressed by fantasies of killing their newborns were interviewed. It was quite a striking article, but unfortunately I can’t find it – aargh!

Both Pinker and Oberman point out that the legal penalites for neonaticide are unusually light for something that’s considered murder. From Pinker’s essay:

Prosecutors sometimes don’t prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail.

(I think that study must have been conducted before the 1997 case, in New Jersey, in which a mother was sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing her one-day infant. She was let out of prison after three years).

Interesting stuff…