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
The day that the baby was found, naked, entangled in the reeds along the shore of Laurel Lake, the heat was almost unbearable. It was September, but the affluent towns of Long Island’s North Fork, across Montauk Bay from the celebrity-crowded Hamptons, were doing brisk business at the ski and board shops, as local teens traversed Main Road from the salty Atlantic to the freshwater pond tucked in behind Laurel Lake Vineyards. A couple of swimmers splashing through the sandy shallows noticed Michael James Ellwood, of indeterminate age—a day, a month, it was hard to tell—no one was going to stare into a dead child’s face.
The news got around pretty fast, bouncing through Peconic, Mattituck, Cutchogue, and Greenport as people stopped in at The Cider Mill, Wayhouse Antiques, and McDonald’s, until eventually it reached Michael’s mother, who was hanging out at her friend Cheryl’s house. Amy Ellwood, the eighteen-year-old, college-bound daughter of two local teachers, summer employee of Dave Allen’s Tent and Party Services, was shocked. Not by the news itself—she knew where she’d disposed of her son on the day of his birth—but by the fact that people she didn’t know, adults in suits with somber faces, were making inquiries. She hadn’t anticipated an investigation. “I couldn’t imagine,” she later explained, “why the police were involved.”
Amy Ellwood, of English rose complexion and long blond hair, inhabited a corner of the universe so tidy and safe that she might have been Betty, denizen of Riverdale in the Archie comics. Hers was a world of trim, white sidewalks shaded by apple and elm trees, a community both prosperous and placid: a world in which the teen still reigns supreme. Parents are benevolent but unobtrusive, providing their kids with cars, kisses, and spiffy clothes—not negligent parents, just confident ones, who smile over the good report cards issued by Mattituck-Cutchogue High School, which itself could have been in Riverdale, with its red-brick facade, white-pillared entrance, and glossy green lawns.
So it was that for several months in 1989, Amy Ellwood went about the earnest tasks of doing homework, getting good grades, co-editing the school literary journal, and attending the German club, all the while growing progressively rounder with child, and not one adult—her parents, her gym teacher, wives who work part-time at the A & P mall, where she hung out—remarked on her condition. Under the circumstances, the idea that she was now a suspect in a criminal investigation came as a hair-raising surprise.
Ellwood’s bemusement is evident on September 12, 1989, in a videotaped statement taken by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office after her friend Cheryl tipped off the police about who the Laurel Lake baby’s mother might be. Assistant District Attorney Randall Hinrichs interrogates Amy politely. She responds in kind; neither is remotely overheated. They could be going through a theft complaint. Amy peers upward at Hinrichs through her bangs, a poised young woman whose expression suggests she’s just found herself on Mars and is trying to avoid sudden movements lest she aggravate the aliens.
Her story, as it unfurls through this interview and at her subsequent trial, began in August 1988, when she met nineteen-year-old Chris Wilshusen. He was a maverick, a pretty cool guy who had recently been expelled from the high school where Amy’s father served as principal. That lent their romance a Romeo and Juliet quality; it had to be kept secret from her family. They began dating, she said, “four days before my seventeenth birthday”—the sort of detail so treasured by young women in love they consider it rightfully theirs to insist upon, a date to celebrate as an “anniversary,” whereas the right to insist upon birth control is neither owned nor remembered.
Amy’s revelation came on New Year’s Eve, at a party cluttered with beer and wine coolers and most of her girlfriends, a group who dubbed themselves “The Circle of Women.” But it was a boy to whom she turned. Randy Sigurdson was in the kitchen when Amy came in, crying. She’d just had a fight with Chris, and she blurted out the news. “It was after midnight,” he told the jury at Amy’s trial, “and I don’t remember [what] led to it, but we were just talking and she said that she had a couple of problems and that she was pregnant.” Randy was sympathetic. But this wasn’t the era of the Scarlet Letter, when pregnancy out of wedlock was catastrophic, leading to social ostracism; nor even a time when immediate marriage was called for lest the girl slip away in shame to a special home. “I said there’s lots of things you can do, there’s adoption, or abortion.”
Amy Ellwood was intelligent, aware, she knew what her options were. But they were such unexpected options to confront. “You see, when I was studying biology,” she would testify, weary and defensive, “I was in tenth grade. I wasn’t exactly planning on having a baby. It wasn’t like I was learning the stuff for my own use.” Yet she understood that her decision had a deadline, less than three months to opt for “termination,” and a few months after that, the body announcing itself, and then a baby, bawling and clinging, changing her life forever.
For a time, she convinced herself that she wasn’t pregnant after all. Then, toward the end of February, when Amy’s parents went on a holiday cruise, her friend Dawn Swiatocha spent the week sleeping over at her house. One night, they decided to drive to the drugstore and pick up a home pregnancy test. The timing was strikingly teenaged, like filching from the liquor cabinet or smoking a joint in the kitchen and raiding the fridge, things to do when parents are away: making illicit runs at grown-up vice. The test was positive, and that abruptly changed the mood. “I asked her if she was going to have an abortion,” Dawn said, “and she wasn’t sure.” Mostly, she didn’t want to think about it. “I did not want to believe I was pregnant,” Amy testified.
Nevertheless, she discussed it with Chris. His response was typical of young men in these times: to become awkwardly solemn, respectful of a woman’s “right to choose,” tell you they’ll stand by you, help you with the money, drive you to the clinic, whatever. They won’t break up with you, they promise, they ask if you’re okay, they even evince shy pleasure at the fact that you’ve conceived their child. But they don’t offer to marry you, and you don’t expect them to, and they don’t stake a claim to the baby, and you wouldn’t expect that, either. At some point, after this is all over, the odds are very good that they’ll vanish from your life. Not because you spawned an incipient family together and lost it, and the relationship was strained by the trauma, but because love itself is disposable.
For the post-Sexual Revolution generation, raised on a rhetoric that celebrated sexual freedom but had no memory of what the revolution was for, there are no links between intimacy and commitment, pregnancy and childbirth, sex and the beginning of a bright, constructive love. AIDS may have made them more fearful, ushering in a fad of celibacy, but it hasn’t taught them how to care take their hearts. For Ellwood, the decision to have her child or not had to be made in a vacuum. “We talked about, I guess, the decision we had to make,” she said at trial, “and at that point the most sensible thing to do was to get an abortion.” But “sensible” was pure abstraction. “It didn’t feel like the right thing for me to do. Just the fact that it was Chris’s and my baby and I—I couldn’t do it.”
Without being able to articulate what she’d found, Ellwood held on. She held on the way that a child, discovering something of uncertain value, a beautiful shell on the beach, carries it in the palm of her hand until, unable to grasp any further purpose for it, she lets it fall to the sand. “At the very beginning, after I decided that I wasn’t going to get the abortion, it still didn’t seem real that I was pregnant.” She quit smoking, for about three weeks, then resumed, perhaps because to quit was to acknowledge the baby. “Later on, when I started to gain weight, I realized that it wasn’t going away and it was real and I was pregnant.”
There is a late-June high school graduation photograph of Ellwood, smiling through a bouquet of flowers on the steps of the school, surrounded by family and school chums. She is about seven months pregnant, blooming outward from her gown, her smooth, pale face still baby-round. In July, after observing her in a bathing suit, Amy’s parents gingerly asked her to take “a test.” Instead, she took off for several days with Chris. “My parents and I were pretty close,” she would later say, defending them against insinuations about the “frightened seventeen-year-old girl” who conceals a pregnancy from parents to evade their wrath. “They just, they basically let me make my own decisions and they trusted me. They felt I was responsible, [but] I never really had any problems that I would have to go to them with.” This, as the first problem, was far too disastrous to confess. Ellwood’s father said, “We goofed, that’s true, we knew she was pregnant … but we were scared if we pushed it she would end up on the road with her boyfriend.” Plus, her mother, Patricia, added, “We thought there was more time.… We’re both trained educators. But that doesn’t make us experts.”
Left to their own devices and running out of time, Chris and Amy began tossing around ideas. “I was going to go down to North Carolina to a friend of his. There’s a house down there. And I was going to put the baby up for adoption.… I kept putting it off. I just—I didn’t want to deal with it, and I just figured I would do it someday.” As the summer progressed, her friends grew increasingly worried. “In August, we were in my car,” Dawn Swiatocha told the jury, “and I said that it was getting kind of close to, you know, her pregnancy being over, and I asked what she was going to do, and she discussed—said that she had talked to someone about adoption—that she had spoken to a lady and the lady was going to take care of everything.”
But at 3:30 in the morning on September 8, when Amy sat up in her Raggedy Ann sheets, awoken by contractions, and began to pace back and forth between her bedroom and the bathroom, there wasn’t any lady to take care of everything. “I knew I was in labor,” she said. But when her mother knocked on the bathroom door around six—“Amy, are you all right?”—Amy said, “I’m fine.” She wasn’t. “I was scared.” But she’d made a decision. The baby was going to go away now. The problem was going to end. This was not going to be a live birth, it was going to be a miscarriage; that happens, doesn’t it, and isn’t the mother’s fault, is it?
The video camera rolls in the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. A pack of cigarettes, a cup of coffee, and a tin foil ashtray have been placed before Ellwood, but she touches none of them, not even to fidget. Instead, she leans forward, shoulders slightly slouched, resting her elbows on the table, and interlocks her fine-boned hands. She is concentrating hard, watchful and compliant. Because Randall Hinrichs has asked her, she says, “My water broke around five, five-thirty.” He keeps asking, and she keeps answering, detail by detail. “I went back into the bathroom, into the shower … uh, that’s when I started giving birth … my brother Brian probably left around six and my parents left around seven or seven-fifteen.… it [came out] around six-thirty, seven.… I pulled on the umbilical cord and pulled out the afterbirth, I heard it make a noise, twice, I saw one of its legs jerk … I put a towel around the baby and I picked it up out of the bathtub and I put it into a bucket, I added another towel around it and I brought it into my room … I fell asleep.”
At some point in this account, the ADA needs to clarify an issue: Was Amy Ellwood intending to be a good mother, but didn’t know enough, when she wrapped her boy in towels and placed him in a bucket?
“I just decided I could—”
“You thought you could—”
Their words overlap.
“Yeah—”
“I don’t want to put words in your mouth—”
“Get away with it.” She fixes him with a grim half-smile and nods.
“Get rid of the baby right after it was born?”
“Yeah.” She adds, “Well, that’s not what I planned all along. You know, I wanted to tell my parents eventually, but I never, I never could.”
“And you decided you weren’t going to help the baby once it was born?”
“I didn’t know what I was thinking. I just, I thought my parents wouldn’t find out that way.”
On September 12, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office charged Ellwood with one count of murder in the second degree. A Grand Jury then reduced the charge to manslaughter.
In 1988, more than four thousand teenagers between the ages of ten and nineteen became pregnant in Suffolk County. Some had abortions, others gave their newborns up for adoption, others kept them. A handful, as Amy Ellwood did in 1989, gave birth to them and gave them back to God. A colleague of Ellwood’s father watched his daughter, Loretta Campbell, plead innocent in Hempstead to charges of second-degree manslaughter for smothering a boy she’d given birth to on January 1, 1991, at a friend’s house in affluent Hewlett and leaving him in a garbage bag. Two weeks earlier, a C. W. Post College sophomore had been charged with first-degree manslaughter for gagging her baby with toilet paper and dumping him in a dorm hallway garbage can. Then there was a twenty-one-year-old Uniondale woman who pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter for killing her newborn boy, and a twenty-year-old Brentwood woman who threw her baby out a window, and an East Northport woman who left her infant to drown in a tub. Other babies in Suffolk County were found by the police but never connected to those who destroyed them. Still others were probably never found.
Across the country, according to the National Center on Health Statistics, the killing of infant children climbed 55 percent between 1985 and 1988, until it was several times the rate at which adult women were murdered. Nearly half of the child maltreatment fatalities between 1985 and 1992 in the United States involved infants up to a year old. According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, infanticide was (as recently as the mid-1970s) as common as or more common than the killing of adults in most of the industrialized nations, from Canada to Austria to Japan. In the United States, more infant boys are killed than girls. The gender of the perpetrator varies. An American one-year-old is as likely to be attacked by a woman as a man, while the vast majority of murdered newborns are victims of women. A wide consensus exists within the community of academicians who try to track neonaticide that many “neonates are discarded but not found, making the overall rate … considerably higher than the data suggest.”
Ever alert to the possibilities of a new trend, the media turned their short attention span to this issue in the early part of the decade. In April 1991, for example, the Saint Louis Post Dispatch ran a story headlined “Infanticide Increasing, Experts Fear.” The story cited more than a dozen cases in Missouri and southern Illinois in the previous five years and commented, “Authorities have no idea how many have gone undetected.” The cases reported by the Dispatch echoed those in Long Island—babies born in dorm rooms and disposed of in trash cans. A forensic psychiatrist at the Menninger Clinic told the newspaper, “Most of the women who kill their newborns are quite young, single, uneducated and desperate. The child is obviously a burden to them, and they get rid of the burden the only way they can think of, by killing it.”
Amy Ellwood’s parents retained for her a lawyer, Eric Naiburg, who told the media that he planned to launch an “unwed mother syndrome defense.” He explained that women who deny their pregnancy and neglect their newborns suffer mental derangement caused by being young and single. “In the mind of a frightened seventeen-year-old,” Naiburg said, “the realization of pregnancy is not like flicking on a switch.” Amy was troubled, he explained, because her parents didn’t approve of her boyfriend. “She tried to please her parents a lot.” Her father thought of her as his “good little girl.” The suggestion of a wrathful father lurking behind the scene added a frisson of drama.
What Ellwood did on the day that her son lived and died was as follows: “I went and got garbage bags from my garage so I could put the baby in them. Then I … got a Styrofoam cooler and put another garbage bag inside of it and then I put the other garbage bag inside of that one. I put the cooler in the hatch back of my car. Then I took a shower, and I washed my sheets. Then I went to my friend Cheryl’s house. I told her that I had a miscarriage and that I’d been to the hospital the night before. We went to 7-Eleven and got something to drink and then we went back to her house and watched TV for a while. She wanted to go swimming so we went down to Laurel Lake.… We only stayed there for about a half hour. Then we went and she got ice cream and then I went and dropped her off and then I went home.”
Having driven around all afternoon with a dead or dying infant in the car, Amy decided to call Chris. “I told him the same thing that I’d told Cheryl because I didn’t want them to know, you know. He asked if I was okay and he asked why they didn’t make me stay in the hospital.” A couple of hours later, she met him at the A & P parking lot. “[Then] he went to Greenport to one of his friends’ house, and I went to Riverhead with my friend Cheryl.” Emotion momentarily flushes into Ellwood’s voice, triggered, seemingly, by the memory of Chris going off with his friends—the revelation that the intimate links are, indeed, so eroded that a man makes no connection to the child he’s just lost and cannot rearrange his social schedule to console the mother, any more than she could connect with the child or reveal his fate to the man.
The parents went their separate ways along Main Road, leaving their son behind in a two-dollar cooler in Amy’s parked Toyota.
Around 10:00 P.M., Ellwood returned from Riverhead, where she’d been hanging out with friends at The Circle, a traffic roundabout with a rock in the middle. She picked up her car, drove around for about ten minutes, and made her way through darkness to the lake. “I parked my car and, uh, I shut my lights off and I opened the back and I took the cooler out and … I waded into the water and I dumped the cooler.” Later, in her defense, the pastor at Amy Ellwood’s family church wrote a letter to her judge describing what she’d done in the lake as “a baptism.”
At the end of his interrogation, ADA Hinrichs holds up a police photo of a dead infant for the video camera to zoom carefully in upon. Across the bottom, written in Ellwood’s flowery hand: “This is the baby I gave birth to.” She will not look at her son.
Long Island Newsday ran an editorial at the time of Ellwood’s trial that was sympathetic to her refusal to face what she’d done: “Almost everyone practices denial at one time or another. We may put off calling the plumber in hope that the leak will go away; or avoid breast self-examination because we don’t want to find cancer.… Amy Ellwood is troubled, not malicious.” The view is shared by Suffolk County detective lieutenant John Gierasch, who investigates the babies abandoned in his county. “I think it’s a matter of, it’s like having a simple problem, your car doesn’t work, and you’re not a car person, so you just let it go, and the next thing you know you’re broken down on the side of the road. You’re procrastinating, you just defer and defer and pretty soon you have a mess on your hands. They must make some half-assed attempt to determine that they are pregnant, just to confirm in their own minds, so it’s not like they’re denying that they’re pregnant to themselves. They’re denying it to the world. They’re just not going to deal with it, which maybe young females are more inclined to do than other people. I don’t know if you can call that aggression. But if you shove toilet paper down its throat because it’s crying to shut it up, that crosses another line, that’s aggression. I mean Ellwood just wrapped it up, put it in a bag and disposed of it; there was no overt homicidal act.”
The community perspective on Ellwood’s act of neonaticide raises some important questions about who is in denial here. Our myths about maternal grace—under pressure, pure as nature—are so deeply ingrained that infanticide is the one crime to be all but ignored in discussions of violence. Murdered infants show up on the evening news with surprising frequency. But to most of us, they aren’t reflective, somehow, of female aggression. We only prick up our ears to what, as French historian Michel Foucault once said, is “In The Truth.” Another young offender on a shooting spree? Look at what’s going on with kids today! Another woman raped in Central Park! A new serial murderer! It is as if the killing of newborns and infants fails to compute. As a result, every time a new case compels our attention, we are left to grasp at a few clichés, to point fingers and to invent syndromes, as the moral ground shifts beneath our feet.
When women like Amy Ellwood commit neonaticide, they tend not to be considered women, exactly. They are “young” and “unwed.” They are “uneducated.” They can’t think what else to do with newborn children except stuff them in Dumpsters—they’re dumb. In other words, they are not mothers in a culturally understood and celebrated way. Mothers are strong, long-suffering, altruistic, and resourceful. Mothers are never callous; they are not indifferent. Ellwood seemed to understand this distinction and to play to it when she testified in her own defense, on March 5, 1991. She brought tears to the eyes of Suffolk County Court jurors when she told them that she thought she had miscarried, thought her baby was premature and stillborn when it arrived. She knew nothing of biology. She had imagined that her baby “had gills in the back of its neck and that’s how it breathed in the fluid.” Had she known that her son was alive, she told the jury, when he made his plaintive sounds and kicked his feet, “I would have picked the baby up and loved it like any mother would.”
Ellwood was guessing what any mother would have done. She was guessing, though she knew differently from her own experience, that “any mother” loves her baby at the instant of its birth. References to maternal instinct are so commonplace in our culture that most of us assume there’s some basis for the belief that women instinctively bond with babies and small children in a manner that is inherent to our sex. Is motherhood instinctive? If we are to speak of instinct, which is to say preconscious impulses governed by the limbic brain, we cannot look to the animal kingdom for an axiom about maternal behavior. Most mammals are instinctively protective but selectively so. Animals will foster, reject, or devour their young depending upon circumstances, and females of several species are actively hostile to the young of rival females. But we shouldn’t speak of instinct, because women cannot be simplified that way. To say so debases the interplay of our psychological, moral, and intellectual faculties.
There has nevertheless been a marked tendency within medical literature to extrapolate from animal behavior to human mothers. In 1964, for example, animal behaviorists observed that goats reject their offspring, butting them away, if they are separated after birth for even five minutes. In short order, it was cautioned that women might have the same response. This idea was developed by other scientists, in other laboratories and barnyards, and in 1974, the notion was broadcast that mothers went through a biologically “sensitive” period, immediately after birth, when they had to have skin-to-skin contact with their infants or they wouldn’t bond. This in turn gave rise to a host of articles in nursing and medical journals, as well as the popular media, about how a baby had to be brought to the mother as soon as possible in the hospital, lest the critical period lapse and she butt the baby off her bed.
Ideas about instinctual maternal attachment also come from studies of infant bonding needs, which actually show that the identity of a primary caretaker is irrelevant to the infant, so long as care is consistent and empathic. If a mother dies in childbirth, a child is not developmentally thwarted if a father or stepmother or nanny takes the infant into his or her care. With disconcerting frequency, however, the findings on infant bonding get reversed in medical literature so that the instinctual attachment needs of a baby are portrayed as the instinctual responses of the mother. At the same time, the term “primary caretaker” mysteriously disappears and is replaced by the word “mother,” so that attachment and bonding remain exclusive to the experience of women.
What is really going on here is that science is reinforcing the transcendent sentiment of a unique mother-child bond, an ideal that has waxed and waned throughout history, regaining currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a division of labor between the sexes intensified in the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society. When men were forced into the factories and mines, women came to symbolize the nurturant safety of the home and took on attributes of softness and sentimentality they hadn’t possessed before. As labor divisions grew starker, so did the character attributes of gender.
Idealizing women into a tender-hearted class of perfect mothers does not lead them to behave that way. Dr. Stuart Asch, a psychiatrist and analyst at New York Hospital, began his career in the 1950s by serving as a liaison to the obstetrics ward, counseling pregnant women. The women confided their anxieties to him: that pregnancy made them ungainly, robbing them of their beauty; that their husbands wouldn’t take them out to dinner anymore; that, sometimes, they had “crazy thoughts,” like wishing their baby was dead. “I started to wonder why so many women were saying this,” Asch recalls. This was the fifties, after all; women were ascending to the summit of their identity as mothers in the months leading up to birth. What could possibly make them so disconsolate? Asch also wondered what would happen to the women he spoke with after the babies were born. Would they still have “crazy thoughts”?
Tracking the women he felt were at risk over a period of years, Asch found a high incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome among their children. He published his suspicions of infanticide in a medical journal. The article marked the beginning and the end of his research. “The SIDS people got women to write me terrible letters, awful letters. What kind of a man was I to suggest that a woman could kill her child?” Asch wasn’t willing to venture into the arena. “I dropped my work.” Very few doctors or academics have proved any more willing than Asch was to challenge the maternal ideal.
The sentimental vision of Mother in the nineteenth century has persisted well into the twentieth, left intact by feminists when so many other so-called female attributes have been radically challenged. Indeed, the maternal ideal lies at the very heart of feminist resistance to the possibility of female aggression. Thus when feminists have pondered infanticide at all, they have tended to construe it as a masculine conspiracy to make good women do bad things. Of Ellwood, Greenport, Long Island, resident Deb Winsor wrote to Long Island’s Suffolk Times: “I find the verdict to be another sad and pathetic indictment of our legal system as it addresses women’s reproductive rights.… Once again our system reinforces that men have the option of abdicating their reproductive responsibility after conception.” A letter to Newsday from Shirley Abbott Tomkievicz read: “Many of us seem to view female sexuality as a punishable offense.… Why wasn’t [the father] on trial for manslaughter as well? Is this 1991 or 1691?”
“Under Christianity,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1975, “infanticide was forbidden as a policy but it continued nonetheless to be practiced as an individual act, in which women, raped or seduced and then branded with their ‘sin,’ and under pain of torture or execution, have in guilt, self-loathing and blind desperation done away with the newborns they had carried in their bodies.” Of course, history is rich with evidence that married women freely loved and made love to their husbands, and took freely chosen lovers, and did not treat the offspring of those unions well. Thirty-three percent of the infanticides in France during the eighteenth century were committed by securely married middle- and upper-class women. Infant abandonment and killing were rather rampant among the aristocratic women of Greece and Rome. In all these cases, there were abundant servants to whom such offspring could be farmed; in very few instances had the mothers been tortured or executed.
Infanticide has been committed throughout human history for a multiplicity of reasons—personal, political, superstitious, and strategic. Whether or not a culture supports the perpetrators of infanticide, it is, like other forms of violence, highly mutable. In many cultures, offspring weren’t considered to be fully human until they reached a certain age, one or two, sometimes three years old. Perhaps the most common cause of violence against infants arose from the need to space children in the absence of birth control. The Japanese word for infanticide means “weeding,” as in the thinning of rice saplings. Today, in some of the poorest communities in the world, infanticide as birth control takes a passive-aggressive form: babies are given birth to, then simply not fed. Cultures have also engaged in crude forms of eugenics, turning against twins, against girls, against deformities—as some societies continue to do, now, through selective abortion. Infants have been killed, as well, during famine, or in the midst of war, or as an offering in ritual sacrifice.
Stepparents have often posed a particular threat to infants and small children, primarily, it seems, for sociopolitical reasons—the desire to preserve their own bloodline when resources (food and inheritable land) were scarce. Hence the origin of wicked stepmother figures in fairy tales. The monstrous relations of Snow White and Cinderella were dreamed up by their tellers as cautionary figures—not of the inherent evil of women but of the perils of being a stepchild. Some scholars argue that human beings, like other mammals, have an instinctive hostility to genetically unrelated offspring. The psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly point out that in the United States a preschool-age stepchild is one hundred times more likely than a biological child to fall victim to familial homicide. In 1996, a twenty-three-year-old C. W. Post College psychology student was arrested for paying three thousand dollars to an undercover police officer to smother her boyfriend’s toddler, born to another woman. To the evolutionary psychologist, this woman was acting on an ancient, preconscious drive to promote her own DNA. She was jealous, but her jealousy had magnificent instinctual cause.
Infanticides that convey the deepest mythic resonance are acts of Medea-like revenge against the patriarch, in which a mother harms or kills her children to strike at the father. Medea is a figure of Greek legend who was abandoned by her husband, Jason, who claimed to love her still but said he needed to marry a princess so that he might realize his dream to be king. Medea, like her grandmother, Tyro, avenged herself for this insult and betrayal by destroying Jason’s two beloved sons. A modern name for this, typically implying mental illness, surfaced in the 1990s: “divorce-related malicious mother syndrome.” In 1994, Maria Montalvo, a nurse in Union Beach, New Jersey, drove her son and daughter to her ex-husband’s home. She doused the car in gasoline, rang the doorbell, and, when he stood upon the threshold, set the car ablaze. While it is extremely rare in North America to see such retaliation taken to the extreme of filicide, the destruction of children as an act of revenge or rebellion has its place in history. Psychologist Shari Thurer has suggested that a woman’s resentment of her status as a second-class citizen related to high infanticide rates among Greek aristocrats. Historian Ann Jones describes widespread infanticide in colonial America as a “revolutionary” act in a “patriarchal society,” committed by women who resented being punished for sex.
Historically, it has been difficult to isolate individual female motive from cultural practice and belief. Personal impulses in the murder of infants merge, as Brandt Steele notes, “almost imperceptibly into other forms of infanticide that relate to economic, moral, religious, political, or military causes.” In the twentieth century, no explicit cultural support for this deed exists, and as a result, it ought to be easier for us to see the nuanced diversity in female experience that inspires the crime. But if this is increasingly true for child homicide and fatal child abuse, we are still prone to sweeping and reductive generalizations where infanticide is concerned. According to Donna Stewart, a physician and the head of the Women’s Health department at Toronto General Hospital, “Women who commit infanticide run a wide spectrum, from those in denial, who were concealing their pregnancy and concealed its consequence, to highly impulsive women who, in a fit of rage, shake their baby to death, to manic-depressive women, to those who are suffering from classical depression who wind up killing their babies and themselves.” They are women from all classes, all races, all shades of fortitude, sanity, love. “We need,” Stewart notes, “to broaden our categories, recognize the individuality of women, so that we can confront risk on a case-by-case basis.”
Research on maternal aggression is stunningly scant. Most of it is lumped into a single category of madness, linked directly to female hormones. “Postpartum depression,” also known as “new mother syndrome,” has been advanced for well over a century to explain why good women, culturally celebrated mothers, would turn inexplicably violent. About half of all women who give birth do experience a hormonal shift within three to eight days that makes them disconsolate, weepy, or irritable. Sometimes called the “baby blues,” this passing storm is loosely comparable to how one feels in early pregnancy or premenstrually. It isn’t a springboard for serious aggression. It comes, it goes. The body resolves itself. About one in five hundred women, however, get more unhinged when they have a baby, to the point of becoming suicidal or homicidal. Some enter a frightening realm of the mind known as postpartum psychosis. They become delusional, they hallucinate, their babies fall from bridges, are suffocated, drown. Within the medical community, there are those who insist that postpartum psychosis is purely hormonal, that if women are treated with hormone supplements while still in the hospital after giving birth, they’ll remain grounded and content in their new maternal role. Internationally, the most prominent advocates of this view are members of the Marce Society, a research organization devoted to isolating the biological underpinnings of postpartum disorders. The logic implicit within this view is that hormonal insanity is something to which all women are automatically susceptible as soon as they get wheeled out of the delivery room.
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.”
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.
Adopting the discreet position of British psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association views childbirth as simply a trigger for a variety of psychiatric conditions. The APA bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), has no listing for postpartum psychosis but cites “postpartum onset” for certain mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and clinical depression. In pre-World War II Britain, psychiatrists believed that “exhaustion psychosis” due to sleep deprivation was more operative as a risk factor for mothers than hormonal change. Recognized in both England and the United States, exhaustion psychosis refers, essentially, to being so tired that one can’t navigate the shoals of reality anymore. Anyone who has gone without sleep for a long period of time knows what it’s like. Truckers, doctor-trainees, nurses, soldiers, and new parents can all describe the experience of being so exhausted that they get delusional, disoriented, extremely emotional. Mundane annoyances can trigger weird, wild rages and crying jags. Pushed to the brink, people in this condition temporarily lose their grip. Some hallucinate. When sleep deprivation combines with the constant demands of a baby, a lack of support, and insecurity or resentment about parenting, a normally well-balanced person can come perilously close to violence. This is not true just of biological mothers. Fathers and adoptive mothers have been documented with postpartum onset exhaustion psychosis.
Kate R., an upbeat, happily married woman in her thirties with some money in the bank and lots of solid family around her, gave birth to her first baby in 1992 and fell into the special hell of infant colic. She recalls the precipitous crash downward from her elation as an expectant mother: “When I was pregnant, it was wonderful. The sex was great, people were terrific, they smiled at me on the street, they helped me out. Then you give birth and doors slam on the stroller.” Add colic: “After Claire was born, when we were still in the hospital, I could hear her crying down the hall. No one else’s baby was crying. And she wouldn’t stop, it just wouldn’t stop. The nurses would say, ‘Maybe it’s your milk.’ They’d have to bring her to me so often to try to calm her … they’d give me these looks. From the word ‘go’ even the hospital society was telling me, ‘This isn’t cool.’ ”
Kate sits in her New York living room, cross-legged, cradling a cup of tea. Claire is out in Central Park with her father, who was attentively present through the nightmare, right away giving Kate a leg up to sanity that some mothers don’t have. “I can see how sleep deprivation is a torture, how it’s used all over the world. At one point I didn’t wash my hair for ten days, because washing your hair takes six minutes, and that was six minutes to sleep. It was scary, because I could not relieve her pain, and I felt it was something I was doing wrong. My exasperation and exhaustion turned to fury in the middle of the night. Motherhood wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It wasn’t my ideal.” Beset with conflicting emotions, unhinged by exhaustion, Kate felt turned upside down. “So you lose it, you lose it. You feel like you’re not going to be able to cut it, that you’re not going to be a good mother.… I would never have hurt my daughter, but I can see that, in the worst way, it’s reasonable to think of smothering the baby, just making it stop.”
Kate had a loving and supportive extended family, who took Claire off her hands for hours at a time. But what if she’d had none? What if she were isolated, and the expectation of perfection was that much more intense? What if her personality was that much more impulsive or volatile? What if, biochemically, her brain were more vulnerable to psychosis? What if she’d grown up in a violent family, so that lashing out in a sleepless frenzy didn’t seem all that crazy? These are factors that add their force to individual women’s responses, becoming trigger mechanisms for fatal abuse.
Kathleen Householder, of Rippon, West Virginia, smashed a rock over the head of her two-week-old daughter to make her stop “fussing.” Eighteen-year-old Josephine Mesa, of San Diego, battered her two-month-old baby with a toilet plunger. Sheryl Lynn Massip, of Orange County, California, had no sleep for six weeks, took her colicky baby outside, put him on the road, and ran over him with her car. Had these women been treated with “hormone supplements,” as the advocates of postpartum psychosis suggest, would they have been any less tired? Less isolated, ambivalent, impulsive, or stressed? Interestingly, one of the strongest advocates of the hormonal basis of postpartum disorders, Katherine Dalton, notes in her 1989 book Depression After Childbirth that depression and psychosis were less severe in the early part of this century, when mothers were permitted to stay in the hospital for up to fourteen days, surrounded by supportive staff who gave them help and let them rest.
Another cause of postpartum psychosis may be manic-depression, or “bi-polar disorder.” As early as the 1930s, a handful of American psychiatrists came to see, in the life histories of women who experienced psychotic breaks, such as hallucinating that their baby was the devil, an underlying bipolar disorder, with swings downward into depression and upward into mania. Both psychologically and physically, childbirth could trigger an intense bipolar swing, far more dramatic than anything the woman had experienced before. In a manic psychotic state, a woman might kill her baby optimistically, as in the belief that the child will ascend straight to heaven and become an angel. Verlyn Harris, of northern California, slit her baby boy’s throat in imitation of Abraham’s sacrifice: “I thought that I would be seen as having God’s favor,” she explained. Angela Thompson of Sacramento drowned her nine-month-old son in his bath, hallucinating that he was Satan and her husband was Christ. “I believed … in order to expunge the world of the devil that I had to do this tremendous act of faith and drown my baby,” who would then be resurrected by her husband/Jesus. She added: “It was happening to me because of biochemical changes that were occurring in my body because I was weaning my baby at the time.” Thompson was borrowing from the vocabulary of motive, from the notion that biological mothering makes you crazy. Incidentally, she also described herself, at the time of the crime, as being “on a manic high.”
When bipolar mothers suffer depressive psychotic breaks, feelings of nihilism and despair darken into intensely negative delusions. A baby who, for healthy mothers, might merely pose a threat becomes for these mothers a dragon who must be slain. In the 1970s, Dr. Stuart Asch saw the movie Rosemary’s Baby, in which a woman gradually realizes that the fetus she is carrying is not human but demonic. It struck him as an interesting depiction of depressive psychosis. The key, he says, is the specificity of Rosemary’s psychotic obsession with the baby within her, the idea that this child is the devil. “Women who are depressed, postpartum,” he says, “are conceiving of their children as the bad part of themselves, because children are an extension of themselves. By killing them, they get the rottenness out. It’s not hormonal at all.” His is a psychoanalytic perspective. Others, in this bright new era of Prozac, might argue that the affliction is mainly biochemical. Whatever its cause, manic-depression can be screened for, with high-risk mothers kept in the hospital in the weeks after the birth to ensure the infant’s safety. But virtually no hospital in North America will do this. According to both Dr. Asch and Dr. Stewart, it is a form of cultural heresy to suggest that mothers aren’t naturally good. Suspicion of harm interferes with our faith in the maternal ideal. “Mothers are supposed to be blissful,” says Stewart.
Over the years, Stuart Asch has received hundreds of letters, some anonymous, all from American women who’ve killed their babies. They tell the same tale, of reaching out to relatives, pastors, doctors, only to be told, “It’s just the baby blues, you’ll be fine.” “The obstetrician would tell their husbands to go buy them a box of candy. One woman wrote to me saying that she had gone to her minister in desperation. He told her to be a good Christian. That afternoon she killed her child.” In another letter, the woman described smothering her baby, then discovering that her doctor had listed it as SIDS before she’d even had a chance to confess. Sheryl Massip tried for two weeks, before she ran over her son, to get doctors’ attention, even trying to admit her son back into the hospital, where he would be safe from her. With the trend among health maintenance organizations toward overnight stays for mothers who give birth, the women that Asch was able to observe rather carefully in 1950s maternity wards would no longer even attract attention.
Women who suffer from postpartum depression fall into a different group from those with exhaustion psychosis or manic-depression. They don’t lose touch with reality. They find themselves, instead, overwhelmed by its implications. “Pregnancy and the transition to motherhood arouse many psychologic stresses,” note Dr. Stewart and C. E. Robinson in a recent article. “A woman must come to terms with changes in her body image, her relationships with her husband and parents, her responsibilities as well as society’s perception of her role. Jealousy and hostility toward the infant and fear of losing her identity are common feelings as she makes the adjustment.” Stewart and Robinson cite the example of a professional woman who gave birth to twins. “She had long-standing marital problems and was ambivalent about having children. After leaving the hospital, she became increasingly depressed and anxious.” One month later, the woman was rehospitalized, given antidepressants, and treated in psychotherapy. While she was able to work through “her relationship with her husband and mother, her fears of losing her career and becoming trapped and dependent,” she never did bond with her babies.
Queen Victoria apparently succumbed to severe depression after the birth of the Prince of Wales. Being a queen, she was able to sit listlessly about under a dark cloud without changing diapers. Not so most women. Infant and child neglect are probably the most common results of severe maternal depression, far more widespread than infanticide and far more problematic for the culture as a whole. With child abuse, a parent actively attacks the child, but in neglect, as psychologist Brandt Steele notes, “The parent may decide it is a hopeless task, the infant is beyond help, too worthless and unrewarding to bother with; there is no longer any point in caring for it or about it, and the picture of neglect ensues. In general, neglecting caretakers, mostly mothers, tend to be more depressed, listless, hopeless, and more isolated, with their aggression more deeply submerged.”
For Paula Sims, of southwestern Illinois, there was no support from a hospital, no intervention with antidepressants or psychotherapy. She lived penned in in a remote rural home. Over the course of a few years, Sims gave birth to two baby daughters. In each case, after a few months alone in her hauntingly empty home with her baby, popping tranquilizers, pacing, she drowned her daughters in their baby bath tub. Not directly: She didn’t hold them under the water; she wasn’t murdering them. She just went downstairs, poured herself a drink, and lingered in the living room, blown away by what she knew she was doing—which was letting each baby slide downward beneath the water’s tepid surface. Sims managed to persuade her community and her husband that the first daughter had been kidnapped. The second time a baby “vanished” with a “masked intruder” from her house, the police wouldn’t buy it. The found her daughter buried in the woods behind her home, and Sims was charged with murder. For duping her community, she received a life sentence. Having said nothing at her trial, Sims later phoned a journalist from prison and tried to explain for the first time what had happened. It was hard to articulate. It was like a compulsion, which began with what Dr. Stuart Asch might call “crazy thoughts.” Images of her daughters dead and gone. “I was like I gotta do this. I gotta do it. I cannot handle things. I’m a failure.… It just seemed like a dead end. I thought this was a way out, to end it.”
Paula Sims did not speak to anyone about what had happened until she came across some literature on postpartum psychosis in prison and felt maybe that was what had happened to her. She had found her vocabulary of motive, and maybe she was right, as the Marce Society would argue. Or maybe it is just simpler to believe that she’d been insane, that she hadn’t taken action in order to wrest herself free of a stifling life.
Around the time of Susan Smith’s trial for drowning her two small boys in a South Carolina lake, CNN’s “Talk Back Live” broadcast an hour-long show on infanticide. Smith did not commit infanticide, insofar as her older son was beyond the age bracket defining the crime. But she proved a springboard for an audience discussion that focused mainly on cases like Paula Sims’s. CNN’s Susan Rook urged the lifting of women like Sims out of social isolation, and accepting that not all women want to be mothers. The audience was supportive of this view, but they asked: Why don’t these mothers give the babies to women who are waiting to adopt one? Why, instead of destroying them, don’t they offer them as gifts to someone else? In fact, in several cultures, the extended family is alive and well and takes over where individuals must leave off, so that often aunts and uncles and grandparents raise children. In North America, on the whole, isolation is a much more dominant feature of family life. Perhaps women can’t concede their collapse as mothers when no one is around to intervene. But a more complex set of psychological factors is also at work in some cases. If a child can thrive without his or her mother, the mother perceives herself as an abject failure when held up against the maternal ideal, a self-concept that becomes intolerable. When, in the late 1980s, Asch testified at the multiple murder trial of New Yorker Anne Green, who’d killed two of her infants and tried to kill a third, he was asked on the stand, “Would you let this woman baby-sit your children?” “Yes,” he said, “they’re my children, they’re not her children.”
Murder-suicides are the direct consequence of a mother who perceives herself to have failed. She has much in common with the father who gets fired from his job or can’t break an alcohol addiction and comes home to kill his family and himself. A mother who takes her children with her into a garage and lets the carbon monoxide flow is doing so in much the same spirit.
As with spousal homicide, however, fathers are more likely to engage in murder-suicides than mothers, whereas mothers are more likely to borrow suicidal intent as an explanation after the fact. Lieutenant Gierasch can recall only one murder-suicide in Suffolk County, in which a policeman’s wife killed herself and her child. Of eighty-eight infanticidal women in a 1988 study by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, only two killed themselves. Significantly, of all English women admitted to London’s Broadmoor Hospital between 1919 and 1969 for having committed infanticide, 49 percent had attempted or threatened suicide at the time of the offense.
Scholars sometimes describe infanticide as suicide by proxy and argue that it is altruistically motivated, meaning that the woman is not being possessive and selfish in taking children with her or sending them off to death on their own but believes she is tenderly protecting them from hardship. “It may seem paradoxical,” a British psychiatrist and the first to lay out this view wrote at the turn of the century, “but it is not vice that leads to the death of the infant, rather is it morbid and mistaken maternal solicitude.” Nearly one hundred years later, this idea swirled around the death penalty case of Guinevere Garcia in Illinois, when Bianca Jagger and others told the Board of Review why she shouldn’t be executed. Garcia’s drunken smothering of her daughter was attributed to her “fear that her uncle would gain custody of the girl and molest her.” The rather clear implication of describing this sort of murder as “mistaken maternal solicitude” is that women are well-meaning but dumb. They don’t think logically. Death is a “mistaken” act of nurturance. By contrast, when a sample of men convicted of infanticide were surveyed in Brixton Prison in Great Britain, those who offered altruistic motivations were scoffed at. Wrote their interviewer: “The statement ‘that it was best for the children’ … is an expression of the fact that the perpetrator himself thought that the infanticide was the best way out—that is to say, the act was egosyntonic.” It served his purposes, not the children’s. Whether altruism is, truly, at the heart of some infanticides is a matter for research and debate, as is the question of why female suicidal intent rarely turns into suicide in fact. The closest anyone has come through imaginative power to describing altruistic infanticide is Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, about an escaped slave, Sethe, who slits her baby daughter’s throat so that she will never be enslaved. This was not uncommon in the antebellum South, and Morrison reportedly based her novel on a real case. Even here, though, “altruism” is a somewhat misleading word. As the writer Jennifer Uglow points out, “Sethe could not have killed her child unless she thought she owned her.”
In 1989, Lifetime Television ran a documentary called “Postpartum: Beyond the Blues,” narrated by Susan Sarandon. The objective was to expose “the insensitivity of the U.S. court system to mothers who are more victim than victimizer.” The problem with the court system, however, is not that people can’t see women as victims—precisely the opposite was true in Amy Ellwood’s case. The problem is that the response to the crime is so philosophically incoherent and laden with sentiment that the jurisprudence is ambivalent, uncertain of itself. On CNN’s “Talk Back Live” show, the psychologist Patricia Singleton informed the audience that “when a woman is incarcerated for this crime, she generally is punished more severely than a man.” In truth, it only tends to be women who dupe the public into pitying them for a lost or kidnapped baby who receive severe punishment when the truth comes out, as happened to Susan Smith and Paula Sims. Most women aren’t incarcerated for infanticide. Of those who are even convicted, about two thirds avoid prison, and the rest receive an average sentence of seven years. In England between 1982 and 1989, fewer than 10 percent of mothers convicted of manslaughter for killing their children (at any age) were imprisoned; only two of the mothers who’d committed infanticide were. British fathers were more likely to be charged with murder than manslaughter. Over half of the fathers convicted of manslaughter went to jail. Three times as many mothers as fathers are deemed to be mentally ill for killing their children.
We seem to permit a maternal sphere of influence over our youngest citizens, which recedes as children grow and enter the public domain. A woman who is acquitted of infanticide will not so easily escape censure for killing a child. Our collective sense of what is aggressive, of what we deem to be acceptable or unacceptable violence, is reflected in the comments of Suffolk County’s Lieutenant Gierasch: “To me, when girls have babies without anyone else effectively knowing—I don’t view it as aggression in the classic sense. My feelings aren’t so strong, personally, with respect to that. But young toddlers, children, if they’re the victims of outright homicide, is about as outrageous as I deal with.” The child, as opposed to the baby, is the most cherished of all potential victims in our society. This is why a postpartum mother may not, in her “hormonally induced” psychosis, attack an older child and still be considered “more victim than victimizer.”
Juries frequently cry when delivering verdicts in infanticide cases—as they did at Amy Ellwood’s trial—regardless whether their decision is innocence or guilt. According to Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, juries are sympathetic in infanticide cases because “they view the mothers as having lost their most valuable possession already, in terms of the infant.” It is curious that Resnick should say “possession.” If children are regarded as citizens worthy of our protection, infants are perceived, on some level, as mere extensions of women—owned by them, as Uglow observed of Sethe.
Suffolk County Court Judge Stuart Namm, known in legal circles on Long Island as a progressive who generally sympathizes with the poor and downtrodden before him, was not at all sympathetic to Amy Ellwood. He sensed a moral vacuum at the heart of the trial, an absence of cultural wisdom to sustain the overwhelming support for his defendant. If, at one time in history, cultures openly proclaimed their indifference to their newborn members, this wasn’t the time. A long-faced, gray-haired judge with thick, dark glasses, Namm gazed at Ellwood as she leaned into the protective arm of her lawyer. “This, Amy, was no miscarriage,” he began, urging her to give up the satisfying lie she’d told herself. “It was no abortion. It was no baptism. This was purely and simply an act of selfish and reckless manslaughter.” He turned his attention to her supporters, including Long Island’s most tireless victims’ rights advocate, who’d broken ranks in this instance to embrace Ellwood. “All of you believe that you are the real victims,” Namm said. “Well, I’m sorry. But I don’t agree.” He lectured Ellwood’s parents for failing to intervene when they knew she was pregnant. He criticized her lawyer for promising the “unwed mother syndrome” defense, which never materialized. He chastised the district attorney’s office for trying to plea-bargain down to probation, and he expressed anger at the Probation Department for offering a sixteen-page personal evaluation of Ellwood with extensive psychological analysis, which Namm had not requested.
Judge Namm didn’t see any evidence that Michael James Ellwood had been valued. Sentiments about motherhood and young womanhood had together usurped a respect for the child. “It is my firm belief,” he told Ellwood, “that you have yet to come to grips with the tragedy.” No one, he said, “can callously take someone else’s life and walk away with a slap on the wrist.” He sentenced her to two and a half to seven and a half years in prison. Eric Naiburg appealed, and a New York State appellate judge permitted Ellwood to postpone prison until February 8, 1995, so that she could go to college.
What would happen if we took the British route, and enshrined in law a homogeneous view of women as biologically prone to madness—as, by definition, insane to attack their own flesh and blood? As of 1993, only eighteen criminal cases in the United States involved a formal postpartum psychosis insanity defense, although women have been afforded this presumption less officially for years. Of all perpetrators who avoided prosecution for infant murder in Dade County, Florida, between 1956 and 1986 on a presumption of insanity, 83 percent were women. The British legal system invented postpartum insanity as we now understand it, much the same way that battered woman syndrome was tailored for U.S. courts—to accommodate a collective sense that women should be treated lightly for certain crimes. With what result? An enlightened view of women’s lives? Postpartum psychosis was widely used in the nineteenth century in England as a reason why women shouldn’t vote. British criminologist Nigel Walker calls the laws that govern infanticide in his nation “myth-making by legislation.”
Infanticide, like any act of violence, is profoundly idiosyncratic. We can label it this way and that, make generalizations, but ultimately the truth is too personal. In North America, we are still in a position to draw distinctions between one woman and the next, between those who are psychotic and those who are sane, those whose stresses are insurmountable and those who choose not to surmount them. “You are,” Judge Namm told Ellwood, “an intelligent, overindulged and privileged child of two educated, upper-middle-class parents, not some lonely, undereducated, underprivileged, abandoned teenage mother alone somewhere in a dirty room.” Whether or not one agrees with Namm’s judgment, his quest was honorable: to balance within the jurisprudence the social reality of women against the right of small children to live, to be valued.