Neonaticide : When Mothers Kill Their Newborns

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…

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13 Responses to Neonaticide : When Mothers Kill Their Newborns

  1. Elena says:

    Very interesting. That part about these women being “exceedingly passive” hits it on the head for me. It’s why, maybe, everyone feels sorry for them and lets them off the hook, and why they enrage me, personally. I have a visceral disgust for the do nothing, hope it will all go away outlook that may be unfair but there it is. It makes the girls who screw up the courage to tell their parents, or else take care of it by abortion, look like heroes by comparision.

  2. binky says:

    The Scheper-Hughes book “Death without Weeping” is gripping. It doesn’t describe infanticide as most people imagine, but the very basic cost-benefit analysis of allocating resources to children in situations of extreme poverty. Over and over she describes situations where if it seems like the infant is “not going to make it,” resources are supplied to those likely to thrive. The weak become weaker, and die. Of course, which are likely to thrive is a loaded judgement, because there are rafts of studies from around the same time that show unequal (gendered) resource allocation in poor households, with older males consuming a far greater proportion. The other factor is that infant mortality is so prevalent – not just from the passive abandonment to fate – that most of the women she describes don’t even see their babies as babies until well into the first year. They don’t attach, because the chances that the baby will die. Only when the child has “proved” that it will survive – by surviving – does bonding take place. Really interesting stuff, as anthropology, though clearly a shock to some worldviews.

  3. Lauren says:

    So, is Dawn essentially trying to argue that women who abort are mentally ill? It sure would be an ideological cash cow for her Christian crisis center racket.

  4. Richard Bellamy says:

    (Spoiler — unless there’s a statute of limitations for spoiling classics after a century or two.)

    While it has been a few years, I believe neonaticide was a major subplot in “Adam Bede” by George Eliot. Lower class girl has an affair with upper class guy, which she thinks will lead to marriage, but he thinks of as a fling.

    She finds out that he’s not interested in marriage, but he tells her when he doesn’t know she’s pregnant. So she doesn’t tell him she’s pregnant, and kills the newborn in despair.

    If I recall correctly, there was general sympathy for her plight, and her punishment was the relatively “light” sentence of temporary expulsion to Australia.

  5. emjaybee says:

    Depression in pregnancy and just after is not very well understood or explained to most women. I suffered a severe and completely unexpected depression in my first trimester…I didn’t really know how depressed I was until it ended, because I had no experience with anything like that. Not that all these cases involve depression, but the fact that so many of these powerful hormones are involved in pregnancy and after it, combined with the isolation, fear, and helplessness of women without resources (especially teenagers), make infanticide not that surprising.

    I would not go so far to call it any kind of acceptable behavior; to explain behavior is not to excuse it. If it has been prevalent in human societies, well, so have rape and murder; they are still pathological behaviors we should be striving to prevent, in this case, by decreasing the obvious causes. In extreme circumstances, many women will choose to let a child die that they cannot realistically save; this is more a statement about the horrors of starvation that force such choices than about some sort of gap in human morality.

  6. Kyra says:

    Note to Dawn Eden:

    I am not your vision of ideal womanhood.
    I don’t like babies.
    I wouldn’t kill a newborn, but I would have aborted an unwanted pregnancy beforehand. With a coat hanger or imported drugs if necessary.
    I won’t be used as a baby machine.
    I won’t be silent when others are forced to do so.
    I will have sex whenever I choose, and take the Pill, and not let worry about getting pregnant interfere with my enjoyment of it.
    No fetus or ball of cells has more of a right to my body than I do.
    I don’t care what your morals have to say about it.
    I don’t care what your god has to say about it.
    I don’t care what any pharmacist, clergyperson, lawmaker, or dumb fuck of a president has to say about it.
    I worship a Goddess who created me to be the equal of any man on this Earth.
    I refuse to worship any deity that would create anyone to be inferior.
    I vote pro-women’s-rights, pro-gay-rights, pro-environment, anti-corporate-tyranny.
    I am not your vision of ideal womanhood.
    I do not have to be.
    I am MY vision of ideal womanhood.
    It is my right.
    LIVE WITH IT.

    Damn, that felt good.

    And, I don’t think neonaticide is a mental illness either. I wonder if sometimes neonaticide isn’t perhaps the humane thing to do, as opposed to letting it die of thirst or exposure. And sometimes there really are no other valid options. Apparently in my state, a woman can leave a newborn up to three days old at any hospital, and be cleared of any criminal charges, but the nearest hospital is, for example, about fifteen miles from where I live, and someone might not have any access to a car, or live even farther away from a hospital, or not even know where one is. Plus there’s the nagging worry that you might have sentenced a child to grow up in a conservative family; just knowing there are people like Dawn around who might adopt just gives me the creeps.

  7. Kyra says:

    OK, change that line to read “I don’t love babies.” I rethought that about four seconds after I hit the ‘submit comment’ button, and realized that “don’t like” may imply active dislike, which is not the case.

  8. Richard Bellamy says:

    Oh, also Beloved, for a more recent neonaticide in literature.

  9. Rock says:

    Pinker writes,
    “And that neonaticidal women do not commonly show signs of psychopathology.”

    However Oberman states,
    “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…” “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…” “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.”

    I am not a Mental Health Professional, but Oberman seems to disqualify Pinker’s statement as the behavior he describes does seem to be pathological.

    I do not share Elena’s disgust, because if it is a pathology there is some deniability of conscious responsibility. To me the fact that one is moved to murder anyone is evidence of pathology. The absence of visible pathology may be as a result of extreme denial, child? What child? This topic and the details of its reality promote a deep sadness. One has to feel terribly for the girls/women living in environments of such seeming desperation as to follow this line of action. Especially when there are numerous options short of killing a newborn, conservative adoption included, that are so very visible to one without impaired seeing.

    Neglect and violence on other living beings is never a good thing, the victims in all forms should be dealt with in kindness and compassion that must be absent from their life experience. Blessings.

  10. mythago says:

    It’s certainly not mentally healthy to be that passive, but it’s not the kind of “mental illness” Eden is talking about. She is saying that a woman who does not feel ‘instinctive’ love toward her child she is pathological. (Clearly, Ms. Eden has never been a mom.)

  11. Fielder's Choice says:

    If a woman gives birth in a ladies’ room over a stirrup, she should close the lid. There are few things more painful than prosecuting a woman for murder because she has gone into labor in public, went somewhere private, confusing nothing, and passed out while their infant has drowned in an actual toilet. It’s reason enough that the world needs to open up public bidets.

  12. Motherhood among humans is definitely a learned behavior. Speaking of good books about the issue, I agree with Richard B. that Adam Bede did a good job of explaining the mindset that can lead a girl to kill a baby, and I also would like to plug Sheri tepper’s “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall” which includes a lot of info about primate behavior as well as human behavior – there have been studies done on mother monkeys / apes raised in captivity who did not “learn” motherhood from being part of a monkey/ape society and they mostly abandoned or killed their infants; motherhood was definitely not instinctive.

  13. Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Mothers and Fathers Who Murder Get Treated Differently Because They’re Different

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