In 1902 Dr John Baker, a physician superintendent of Broadmoor Hospital, had this to say about women who kill their newborn children: “This class of crime perpetrated by insane women has not attracted the attention it deserves; the literature on the subject is scanty in the extreme; ... the mental causes are insidiously at work for many weeks ... it may be called transient frenzy.”
Nearly 100 years later, QED says much the same thing. The programme contrasts two cases of young women: American Twyana, who abandoned her neonatal daughter and then summoned help anonymously, and British Kate, whose baby died and who was only discovered (apparently) when she tried to dispose of the body four weeks later. The programme did not make clear whether Kate had killed the child directly or indirectly, by neglect; both possibilities have been described in the literature.
In fact, the programme’s general implication that little is known about neonaticide is misleading. Compared with Dr Baker’s day, the literature is now not so scanty. It is well established that there is a disproportionately high rate of child killing in the first 24 hours of life and the perpetrator is most likely to be the mother. Boys and girls, usually firstborns, are equally at risk. The mother is usually young, described as “naive,” and is rarely found to be mentally ill.
What the programme makers wanted to emphasise was the denial of pregnancy, which is a feature of nearly all such cases. The pregnancy is denied, not only by the woman in question but also by those around her. Labour and delivery are brutal reminders of reality, which may cause the woman to panic and kill or abandon the child. Sometimes it seems that she is so shocked that she can care neither for herself nor the baby, who may then die from neglect.
The psychiatrists interviewed claimed that the women really were unaware that they were pregnant, (presumably) because it was so unacceptable. This raised some interesting questions for me, especially in this post-feminist era. What is so awful about getting pregnant? For Twyana, the answer was clear and poignant; she was under pressure to do well at university, and she had, in her own terms, “messed up.” She said that, after the baby was born, she thought to herself: “I don’t want her to die, but I don’t want to mess up.” I wondered who had told this young woman that getting pregnant was “messing up,” that having a baby was the end of all her hopes. I wondered who had suggested to her (subtlely or not so subtlely) that it is not possible to have a baby and a college degree. I wondered what she had been told about motherhood, pregnancy, and general reproductive health. She ended up putting her baby in a rubbish bin. As a part time psychotherapist, I could not help wondering whether, at some level, she saw herself, her body, and anything that her body produced as being “rubbish.”
Both the cases made me wonder what sex meant to those women who kill their newly born children. Neither the scientific literature nor QED had much to say about the conception of these babies. The implication seemed to be that they are all conceived out of partnership, in the context of meaningless sexual intercourse. Is this true? Are some of these pregnancies the consequence of rape or incest, and might this be relevant?
I wondered whether another reason that the pregnancy has to be denied is to do with the unacceptability of female desire. Pregnancy is an enormously powerful and visible statement about one’s sex life; male readers may like to imagine the effect of walking down the street with a large banner saying “One night, about nine months ago, I had sex with someone.” For most pregnant women, the banner also says “because I really like sex and I really wanted to.” This doesn’t seem to have been true for Kate and Twyana; there was a sense that their sexual desire was neither debatable or acceptable.
As so often happens when rare events are discussed, the programme raised more questions than it answered. Most of all, it seemed to show how complex and uncertain conscious experience is. Ever since Freud’s studies, the conscious mind has often been treated as if it were superficial and less real than the unconscious. But most violence is carried out by people who are fully conscious of what they are doing, even if the reasons are less clear to them. Neonaticidal women are good examples of cases when someone’s death seems the only solution to a complex dilemma, perhaps showing us just how far there is still to go in understanding the motivations behind human tragedy.