Monsters of Inhumanity? Methods of Infant Disposal (original) (raw)
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2021
On October 2, 2020, a newborn infant girl was discovered in the trash in an airport bathroom in Doha, Qatar. There was a rush to secure the infant's life, which was successful. There was a rush, also, to find the infant's mother, an effort that involved subjecting several women to intrusive physical examinations to determine if they had recently given birth, leading, eventually, to international outcry.
Chapter 14 Unnatural Women Reflections on Discourses on Child Murder and Selective Mortal Neglect
The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency, 2020
Hogan, S. 2020. Unnatural Women: Reflections on Discourses on Child Murder and Selective Mortal Neglect in LaChance-Adams, S. Cassidy, T., Hogan, S. (eds.) The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency. Canada, Ontario: Demeter Press. pp. 247-261. Abstract This chapter reflects on historical ambivalence toward mothers, especially a reluctance to prosecute, or harshly punish, women who murdered their newborn babies. I suggest that in nineteenth and early twentieth century England there was increasing social tolerance towards child murder that ran counter to the polemical and evangelical religious arguments against the crime. In this chapter, I consider the legal perception of cases of intentional child murder and the debates that took place in court, referring to trial records. This ambivalence about convicting women for murder was manifested in an ad hoc manner with a variety of defence strategies in operation as will be illustrated. As one might expect, the cases themselves varied tremendously, from a woman in utter despair attempting to kill herself and her baby simultaneously by drowning, to cases in which the murder might be considered to be quite calculated. While cases in which sickly and possibly unviable infants, are "let go" through a process of selective mortal neglect, are technically murder, they are quite different from putting a newborn to a violent end. I argue that a variety of social practices and attitudes towards childhood illness obscured a high tolerance of child murder, and that the neglect of newborns elicited tacit understanding, if not social acceptance. Lewd Murderers? The Legal Situation in England Modern sensibilities are very different from those in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with respect to how mothers who murdered were regarded and depicted in public domains. This chapter will elucidate these profound differences.
Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England.”
Journal of Women’s History , 2005
Throughout Western history, abortion has been a contentious issue; nevertheless, ethically and legally, society has drawn a line between voluntary and involuntary abortion. Women who bring an abortion on themselves by enlisting the services of a medical practitioner or by imbibing venomous draughts have rarely managed to draw sympathy from the communities in which they live. On the other hand, pregnant women who become the victims of brutal assault and miscarry as a result, have been treated in a different manner entirely. According to medieval common law, if the foetus had already been endowed with a soul (roughly around the third month), such an attack was indeed homicide. It has been argued, however, that in practice, English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as such. Cyril C. Means, Jr. maintains that not only was an abortion not felonious in medieval England, it was not even criminal. More recently, John M. Riddle reminds us that we “must distinguish between legal principles as known by jurists and the principles of fact on which juries were willing to find people guilty.” While medieval common law probably viewed abortion by assault as a crime, English jurors did not. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, like rape, male jurors are loath to impose the death penalty. Both Means and Riddle base their conclusions on a mere handful of cases. A greater number of cases presents a much different view. While conviction rates for assault on pregnant women are very low (not unusual given the general reticence of jurors to convict for any felony), the responses of those involved demonstrate that Englishmen and women certainly believed it was a crime of felonious proportions. Moreover, the role played by husbands as plaintiffs makes it clear that this was not merely a women’s issue. As the recent work of Becky R. Lee and Fiona Harris Stoertz indicate, the birth of a child was a moment of great pride and celebration for medieval men; they not only cared for the welfare of their unborn children, but also the future health and fertility of their wives. Abortion by assault was never an easy judgment for jurors to deliver; but there is very little reason to believe it was not a criminal matter, taken seriously by plaintiffs, jurors and defendants.
Routine Infanticide in the West 1500-1800
History Compass, 2016
Historians have assumed that early modern Europeans did not practice neo-naticide similar to the great Asian civilizations, but sex-ratio studies are only now entering the demographic literature. This article passes in review both published and unpublished research on sex ratios at baptism in Italy, France, England and colonial Acadia, together with juvenile sex ratios drawn from censuses in Germany, France and Italy. Both endemic and conjunctural imbalances appear everywhere, but they could target females or males depending upon the context. It is still considered newsworthy that in much of the world, parents select the sex of their children before bringing a pregnancy to term. In China, the sex ratio at birth is currently 116 males for every female, while in India, the rate is 111, significantly above the well-established biological norm of 105. 1 This sex preference creates well-publicized difficulties for young men seeking brides (The Economist, April 18 2015). Why kill females preferentially? The literature often lays the blame on misogynistic ideologies, suggesting that it would be sufficient to combat them with propaganda in order to eradicate the practice. There are several better reasons: first of all, in agricultural economies requiring strenuous ploughing with large animals and equally strenuous field and forest work far from home, males were better value. In patrilocal societies where husbands, or their families, received a sizeable dowry for the bride (which served as a security cushion for her and her children in the event of the premature death of either spouse), parents were unequal to the task of providing those for several daughters. Finally, if the aim is to keep the future population stable in order not to overstretch resources, then killing future child-bearers is simply more efficient than killing males and females indiscriminately. Today unwanted pregnancies are usually terminated by abortion, but in the past, the safer solution was to kill the newborn or expose it to the elements. Infanticide, like abortion, may be human universals, that is, part of the behavioural repertoire of every known society, although its frequency would vary according to local environmental conditions. 2 Humans are not alone in this behaviour: mothers in many species of mammals will sometimes cull their offspring at birth. In Darwinian language, infanticide, or abortion that has replaced it, are adaptive mechanisms involving some kind of rational decision-making on the part of the parent, which is usually the mother. 3 In most societies, newborns are not considered full-f ledged persons when leaving the womb. Rather, some sort of ceremony confers a name and social identity on them, sometimes providing an additional set of symbolic kin. Returning to the great Asian civilizations where sex-selective behaviour persists, parents enact strategies to better themselves and assess the likelihood of survival and future of the newborn infant. In traditional China and Japan, neonatal infanticide was a kind of post-natal abortion that allowed parents to choose the number, the spacing and the sex of their offspring, while coping better with short-term difficulties like famine. 4 In his compelling recent study on northeastern Japan, Fabian Drixler suggests that one-third of live births ended with infanticide during the 18th century, despite government disapproval of the practice. 5 Historians sometimes
The Insanities of Reproduction: Medico-Legal Knowledge and the Development of Infanticide Law
Social & Legal Studies, 2006
Drawing on autopoiesis theory, Ward (1999) challenges the established view that the adoption of the English infanticide law in 1922 (amended 1938) is an example of the medicalization of law, insisting that the 1922 Act embodied a lay biological theory and that contemporary psychiatric theories of the ‘insanities of reproduction’ focused on socio-economic, rather than biological, stressors. Both the medicalization and autopoiesis interpretations of infanticide law are misplaced. A broader review of the medical literature discussed by Ward, and of a related anthropological literature he does not treat, reveals a more complex picture: while Ward’s critique of the medical- ization thesis is broadly apposite, and an associated anthropological literature was also more socio-economic than bio-racist (Reekie, 1998), there was a bio-medical strand of thought, as well as an equally biological atavistic line of theory regarding infanticide, which ran alongside the socio-economic model. In addition, the expressed biologism of infanticide law, whatever its origins, can still be thought of as contributing to the medicalization of law subsequent to its passage and amendment, especially given the dominance of the bio-medical model in psychiatry since the 1960s. KEYWORDS atavism; autopoiesis; colonialism; infanticide; medicalization