Another Depressing Aspect To The Current Reading

Another Depressing Aspect To The Current Reading

The large number of women executed for infanticide--in almost every case, unwed mothers (or worse, wed to someone who is away at sea at the time of conception). Typically these are cases where the mother (sometimes as young as 14) has managed to conceal her pregnancy from neighbors--and sometimes even from parents or landlord--and then kills the newborn in the hopes of not having the illegitimate birth discovered. Sometimes the death is just neglect--but often as not, they have actively caused the death, by strangulation, or bludgeoning. The most gruesome of all are the cases where the child is dropped into the latrine to drown.

It's tempting to blame all of this on the barbarism of Colonial America's punishments for fornication and bastardy (both of which were serious crimes). But we have plenty of examples of this in the modern era--when there is not only no criminal sanction for being an unwed mother, there's barely any social disapproval (at least from the elites that define popular culture). And of course, the distinction between abortion and infanticide is primarily a legal one.

I scratch my head when I think about these cases. These weren't spur of the moment decisions: these women knew they were pregnant for at least many months, with some putting considerable effort into hiding their condition. In a few cases, they had boyfriends trying to arrange abortions--and in at least one case, the mother's conscience took precedence, and the boyfriend ended up in trouble. They had to have known that there were going to be questions about how they had gained so much weight--and then lost it, rather suddenly. There are so many hangings for infanticide in this period that they must have known that the risk of being caught was quite high.

Hearn claims that until 1696 the burden of proof requirement for murder meant that a court had to prove that the mother intentionally caused the death of her child, and that the child was born alive. In that year, he says, "An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murder of Bastard Children," made it a capital crime for a mother to conceal the "birth, death or disposal of a child born out of wedlock regardless of whether the child was born dead or alive." [p. 110] However, Marietta and Rowe's Troubled Experiment says that the law in question was passed in the reign of James I, and other sources such as this refer to a statute with that exact same title from 1624, under James I. I can see the reasoning on this; without such a requirement, there was a strong incentive for an unwed mother to dispose of the evidence, and no reason to not do so.

It's all very depressing. You don't want to repeal laws simply because they are often violated. Laws sometimes discourage misbehavior, even when they do not completely stop it. At the same time, criminalizing what people are doing pretty commonly sometimes leads to worse crimes, as they attempt to hide the evidence of what they have done.