Fatal Maternity (part 4): Unwanted Child Filicide
A glimpse into the dark history of infanticide, cryptic pregnancies, and denied pregnancies.
When Queen Victoria became the new monarch in England in 1837, her donning the crown must have seemed like a beacon of hope for women who had suffered under a harsh patriarchy for so long, which saw them as no more than mere possessions passed on from fathers to husbands, doomed to a life of wifely duties and motherhood and domestic work. Watching a woman take the throne after living beneath the boots of men would have felt like a light at the end of a tunnel.
But it wasn’t to be.
This queen, much like her male predecessors, believed that a woman’s place was in the home, raising children, cleaning, cooking, and tending to her husband’s needs. Tireless, thankless, and exhausting work that warranted no compensation lest she be so lucky to have fallen into a loving marriage. Being a figure in the home, being a mother and wife, were believed to be the only emotional fulfillments a woman ever needed.
And with her own husband, Albert, and her nine children, Queen Victoria became the icon of this era, living her version of what she believed womanhood should be.
Women didn’t need an education or jobs or to be in the public eye. All they needed, she thought, was a home to which she could tend, children which she could nurture, and a husband who she could please.
After all, what else could there be to life for the modern, mid-1800s woman?
Beyond palace walls and the grandeur of royal life, however, middle and lower class woman lived a much harsher reality. When their hopes and dreams of a queen who would sweep in and save them from the patriarchy were smashed to smithereens, many women came to a similar realization: if they ever wanted to vote, own land, think and live for themselves, they had to stand up for themselves. This revelation began the feminist movement of the Victorian era.
Because these women knew not only the reality of marital abuse and rape that occurred in many homes, but of the brutality many pregnancies wreaked upon their bodies and minds, lacking the resources a privileged woman such as the queen would otherwise have. All of which they had no choice but to remain silent over and endure repeatedly. They knew the fear of not being able to afford one child after another after another. Of not being able to feed them all or clothe them.
And God forbid a woman get pregnant out of wedlock.
The New Poor Law restricted and eventually revoked women’s ability to pursue financial support from the father, and severely lacked social services for single mothers. Being an unwed mother came with scorn and shame. Handing out help to her was seen was giving a hand out to someone not worthy of it, someone who had to live with the consequences of daring to have sex without being married.
Most of all, these women knew the darkest secrets of this patriarchal oppression, the desperate acts they committed, even if they never spoke of it to each other.
London newspapers reported frequently on the discovery of tiny infant bodies being in alleys and streets, littering the back passageways like nothing more than trash. In 1862 alone, reports claimed that 150 dead infants had been found the hidden crevices of London streets.
Ann R. Higginbotham wrote of this mortifying era in “Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London.”
London M.P. Surgeon and Coroner Thomas Wakley is quoted in this essay as having declared that “child murder was going on to a frightful, to an enormous, a perfectly incredible extent.”
Infanticide in this era was a real and alarming trend due to the circumstances in which many women found themselves. Many in the medical professions spoke up about what they were seeing in clinics and coroners offices, calling it an “epidemic of infanticide.”
“They advocated various reform measures including supervisions of childminders, increased police vigilance, and changes in the law to improve the treatment of illegitimates,” Higginbotham wrote.
As England moved into the 1830s and 40s, those who were against the New Poor Law pointed out that depriving women who had babies out of wedlock would only be driven to infanticide out of sheer desperation, murdering her baby almost in an altruistic fashion because she couldn’t feed it or afford any care. In a society where women were expected to depend on men, where jobs women could have were too meager to support herself let alone children, the New Poor Law quite ironically left unmarried mothers with no way of holding the fathers accountable for the children they helped create.
“In the second half of the century, charity workers blamed increased infanticide on the lack of services for unmarried mothers and justified their own work in shelters and homes as a means to prevent infant death,” Higginbotham wrote. “One early charity, the Home of Hope, explicitly identified its mission as preventing ‘the dark sin of infanticide.’”
The Harveian Society also pointed out in 1867 that “the life of the bastard is infinitely less protected than that of the legitimate.”
By the mid-1860s, over 80 percent of coroner murder reports involved what were believed to be mostly illegitimate infants. Some claimed this was only a minuscule fraction of the true horror of the matter. The Select Committee on Infant Life Protection voiced their belief that an estimated 10 percent of illegitimate babies ever made it to adulthood.
“Such findings helped not only to expose dangers facing infants but also to buttress a widely held view that infanticide was one of the strategies by which unmarried mothers rid themselves of the burden of unwanted babies,” Higginbotham wrote.
Others believed that infanticide was a way of these women to cover up her disgrace and destruction of virtue, that murdering these infants was done out of cruel malice, treating her babies like something disposable. Infanticide was viewed as a cold-hearted sin to cover up the previous sin of non-marital sex, an act of shame.
This belief could have been true in a small number of cases, but it also could have been a projection of how righteous people viewed this crime so hard to swallow. A belief that perhaps was spewed from the perch of financial and class privilege.
Victorian era women were made out to be monstrous creatures heartlessly murdering innocent babies, to the point where Higgenbotham discussed how it’s believed that some doctors heavily exaggerated numbers for the sake of fear-mongering.
But it wasn’t that simple then, and it certainly isn’t now that we better understand just how pregnancy and child birth impacts women, physically and mentally. There are several factors that could lead to a woman committing neonaticide.
In 1969, forensic psychiatrist Philip J. Resnick compiled the classifications which he believed to encompass the motives as to why women murdered their children. “Unwanted Children” is one of those filicide motives, defined by:
When a parent murders their child because the child is no longer wanted by the parent.
Reasons may include illegitimacy, parental intellectual development disorder, or financial and social burdens.
Resnick notes that this is the most common reason for murdering newborns specifically. But it’s not as simple as a new mother deciding the infant she has carried for nine months and given birth to is suddenly disposable. We know so much more now about the circumstances surrounding why a woman might do this in the minutes or hours after giving birth.
Pregnancies That Sneak In
The drama of unknown pregnancies resulting in neonaticide captures sensational headlines, making people wonder how a woman could overlook nine months of growing a baby inside of her until she gives birth to it.
This is called a cryptic pregnancy. A woman can get halfway through carrying or even all the way to delivery before she realizes she is pregnant. She may get a false negative on a test, and trust the test. She may also lack the usual symptoms. Little to no weight gain, lack of back pain, irregular menstrual cycle, age or fertility issues, or no baby movement are just some of the ways a pregnancy could sneak past one’s notice.
Several studies point out that as many as one in 475 pregnancies remain undetected until the twenty-week (five-month) mark, and that one in 2,500 aren't recognized until delivery.
If the woman wanted children, she may suffer from guilt at not being prepared for the baby, or perhaps depression at missing out on the early pregnancy. After all, it’s supposed to be a joyous time for any woman who longs to be a mother. That joy would be overshadowed with how unprepared she’d be: no basic resources, food, clothing, formula, bed, or anything. This would be incredibly daunting, especially if she is also financially struggling or in a cycle of poverty.
If she didn’t want children or to be pregnant at all, this robs her of being able to make that choice early on, forcing her into giving birth when she didn’t want to.
I found less discussion about cryptic pregnancy in relation to neonaticide, and more about denied pregnancies, though some studies clumped them together. The two could definitely be a combination that ends in tragedy. It’s important to note, though, that other articles discussed how women who discovered a cryptic pregnancy late could still have perfectly healthy babies with proper medical care. For some, it could be a beautiful blessing, and many adapt accordingly. The risk of neonaticide is still present, but it appears to be more often committed after what is called a “denied” pregnancy.
Deny, Deny, Deny
Perhaps more baffling than a woman not knowing she is pregnant is a woman who ignores the pending arrival of a baby completely.
Pregnancy is a period when a woman adapts to the new chapter of motherhood and begins emotionally bonding with her child, understanding that she is growing another human being. It may also be a period when she makes decisions regarding whether she will keep it or not.
This complete denial cuts off that emotional bonding and, consequently, empathy towards that child. A study called “Denial of pregnancy – a literature review and discussion of ethical and legal issues” by Angela Jenkins, Simon Millar, and James Robins notes:
“For many women, this time is full of fears and doubts. On occasion, these fears are so overwhelming that women are driven to deny their pregnancy. This inappropriate defence mechanism may be so powerful, that the woman is genuinely unaware of her condition. She will not accept the pregnancy and is unable to progress to the stages of fetal attachment and preparation for delivery.”
The study adds that often, these women end up giving birth into a toilet bowl. This would come with a world of shock and could evoke an array of reactions, while having no ways of caring for this child.
If she doesn’t want to be pregnant to start, and she misses that five month mark, it becomes too late for an abortion. Not only would she have to adapt to being pregnant and giving birth, she suddenly has to make a decision for a child she may not have wanted or anticipated. Adoption is an option, but it doesn’t amend the fact that some women find child birth traumatizing and not the “miracle” it’s said to be. If this trauma is occurring on top of an existing mental illness, it’s a recipe for disaster.
“Tokophobia: A dread of pregnancy”, a study by Manjeet Singh Bhatia and Anurag Jhanjee, defines tokophobia as “a pathological fear of pregnancy and can lead to avoidance of childbirth. It can be classified as primary or secondary.”
Primary tokophobia is “morbid fear of childbirth in a woman, who has had no previous experience of pregnancy.” Secondary tokophobia is a “morbid fear of childbirth developing after a traumatic obstetric event in a previous pregnancy.” It can also result from miscarriage, stillbirth, or termination of pregnancy. In short, a woman’s fear of being pregnant is a legitimate phobia and can cause issues in marriages, relationships, sexual relations, and mental health.
The possibility of motherhood and pregnancy, for some women, is a nightmare, not a dream come true.
The “Denial of Pregnancy” study says there are “no clear-cut” demographics of women who deny pregnancy. Unlike in other filicide motives, this study said:
“The majority of women studied were in their early to mid-20s, multiparous, with good social support. Many were students or employed. Only a minority had diminished intelligence, substance abuse, mood disorder or psychiatric illness.”
However, it breaks up these deniers into two categories: psychotic and non-psychotic.
Some women, in the chaos of mental illness, don’t acknowledge a pregnancy or the implications of such a life-changing experience. They may attribute certain symptoms to their psychosis, essentially making themselves believe it’s a figment of their imaginations. Psychotic women are more likely to intentionally murder their infant by strangulation or drowning.
Women with no primary mental problems fall into one of three categories: pervasive, affective, and persistent. According to “Denial of Pregnancy”:
“Pervasive denial occurs when not only the emotional significance but also the very existence of pregnancy is kept from awareness. Affective denial is when the woman is intellectually aware of the pregnancy, but makes little emotional or physical preparation for the birth. Persistent denial occurs when woman discover their pregnancy in the third trimester, yet fail to seek antenatal care.”
In these cases, it’s more likely that the child dies from neglect as the mother is disoriented and confused after the birth, or she panics upon delivery, especially if it occurred at home. A 2020 study titled “Infant Homicides in the Context of Safe Haven Laws” found that in 111 infanticides that occurred between 2008 and 2017, seventy-three percent occurred in the first twenty four hours of life. Roughly sixty-five percent of these infants were born at residences.
For a woman to be alone after giving birth to a baby whose existence she denied for nine months is dangerous to both her and the child, psychotic or not.
Cases
Meredith Borowiec
This Calgary woman caused a massive debate in 2010 over Canada’s infanticide laws after she sat on the front steps of her home, watching police and paramedics tend to a newborn baby boy pulled from a garbage dumpster.
Her boyfriend, Ian Turnbull, was on his way home when he heard the infant crying and rescued it, only later to learn he’d saved his own son. And that this wasn’t the first baby his girlfriend, Meredith, had disposed of in this manner.
She was originally charged with attempted murder. However, Meredith later confessed to putting two other babies in a dumpster in 2008 and 2009. Their bodies were never found. When she was arrested the second time upon confessing, she was pregnant again, and gave birth while in custody. Child Protective Services immediately took the baby.
According to Maclean’s magazine, she reportedly told a detective:
“I was horrified with myself… It was like something took over me. It was like I wasn’t in control.”
She described giving birth alone in the home like an “out of body” experience, and didn’t even know the sex of her children.
In 2014, at thirty-two-years-old, she pled guilty to the aggravated assault of the living boy after originally being charged with second degree murder for the other two infants. She was convicted of two counts of infanticide in November 2013, and sentenced to eighteen months, topping off the eighteen months she’d already spent in custody. Upon her release, she is to abide by a peace bond until 2024. This includes a three-year probationary sentence during which time she must conduct regular pregnancy tests done by a medical professional, and report any new pregnancies to her doctor, Alberta child services, and her probation officer.
At her trial, psychiatrists gave conflicted testimony as to how “disturbed” her mind was at the time of the crimes. The Canadian Criminal Code’s infanticide law states:
“A female person commits infanticide when by a willful act or omission she causes the death of her newly-born child, if at the time of the act or omission she is not fully recovered from the effects of giving birth to the child and by reason thereof or of the effect of lactation consequent on the birth of the child her mind is then disturbed.”
Because Meredith remembered the crimes and confessed to them, the psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Kenneth Hashman, said her behaviour was inconsistent with one who suffered from a disturbed mind.
On the defense’s side, Dr. Jeannette Smith said that Meredith was anxious and in a state of panic, becoming depersonalized to the infants and ordeal, which meant her mind was disturbed.
Justice Peter McIntyre decided that while Meredith wasn’t suffering from a disorder, her mind was disturbed when she gave birth and put her babies in a dumpster, effectively ruling that the infanticide law would stand.
There haven’t been any public updates that I could find about Meredith since 2016.
Megan Huntsman
In a quiet, largely Mormon community south of Salt Lake City, Utah, a meth-addicted thirty-nine-year-old woman concealed seven pregnancies during a ten-year period. Megan Huntsman confessed to strangling or suffocating six of them minutes after being born, too lost in the abyss of drug addiction to want to care for them.
According to neighbors interviewed by the Daily Mail, she was quiet and shy, and displayed no signs of pregnancy in those years. She lived with her in-laws while her husband, Darren West, was incarcerated on drug charges in 2006. The Daily Mail reported that Megan’s in-laws allowed her to stay in their home on the condition she remained faithful to Darren during his prison stay. When they discovered she was having an affair, she was kicked out of the home in 2011. Her three teenagers remained with the in-laws.
Megan said she murdered six babies between 1996 and 2006. The seventh, she claimed, was stillborn. Police used DNA to confirm that West was the father of the children, and that they were carried to full term. Somehow, she concealed every pregnancy from him, despite the fact he worked in construction and was home every night.
Darren West, estranged from his ex-wife upon his 2014 release, discovered an infant’s body in a box while cleaning out his parents’ garage. He called Megan, who admitted the baby was hers, and he in turn called police. They discovered the other bodies. The remaining six had been wrapped in a towel and put in a box. Why she kept them is baffling. Out of sight, out of mind, perhaps, seems as she was stuck in addiction at the time?
Megan pleaded guilty on February 12, 2015, and was sentenced to six terms of five years to life on April 20, 2015. She will serve forty-nine years before she is eligible for parole in 2064. She will be eighty-nine-years-old.
In a statement read out by her lawyers in court, Megan said that she wouldn’t have been a good mother because of her addiction, that she “wanted to help them avoid the terrible life I would have given them."
“Depression and alcohol took hold of me the same way drugs did. I cannot give a reasonable answer why I was capable of such a sick and heinous crime. I held my secret for 18 years.”
Brooke Skylar Richardson
Two days after her prom, in May 2017, eighteen-year-old Brooke Richardson gave birth in the upstairs bathroom of the same home where she lived with her parents. She buried the baby in the back yard. Whether that baby girl, which Brooke named Annebelle, was born alive or not, would become the center of an emotional and controversial trial that gripped a small town of 5,000 people.
Brooke was a gorgeous teenager living a quaint American life in Carlisle, Ohio. She was a high school cheerleader with no traumatic background and no signs of what was to come. Brooke struggled for years with a severe eating disorder, which her parents said they tried everything to help her with. But they never knew she was pregnant.
In an interview with 48 Hours, Brooke’s mother, Kim, said the eating disorder consumed “95 percent” of the teenager’s life. With the eating disorder came the urge for Brooke to keep secrets from her family. So, when she went to doctor for birth control after she’d started dating her second boyfriend and discovered she was eight months pregnant, she didn’t say a word. Kim said that Brooke had tried on her prom dress in February, and it still fit in May.
Social media and the press basically crucified the teenager and her family, with protesters and stalkers making it almost impossible to come to and from the home peacefully with any privacy.
But there was some questionable conduct. The gynecologist who saw Brooke reported the home birth and burial of the baby, leading to the cops questioning Brooke. 48 Hours covered this case in great detail, and gives snippets of the interrogations in which detectives appear to lead Brooke on by planting memories in her mind about that night, playing on the fact she had just given birth and was no doubt traumatized and disoriented. I’ll post the full article below. It’s heartbreaking, all around.
Brooke admitted to giving birth and burying the baby, but claimed her innocence from start to finish, only admitting the baby might have been born alive at the detective’s suggestion it made a “gurgle” noise. Otherwise, she said the baby was stillborn.
The coroner then claimed to have found evidence of the body being burned, a statement they later retracted upon further inspection of the remains. But the damage was done. Press and social media ran wild with the idea that Brooke gave birth to a live baby, killed it, burned it, and buried it. But beyond that first interrogation, she has never admitted to this.
Her parents claim Brooke is a people-pleaser and bends over backwards for authority figures, which is why she confessed when she did to detectives.
Dr. John White testified at her trial that the eating disorder could have caused the infant’s death before it was born. Through Brooke’s binging and purging, the fetus wouldn’t have received the nutrition and growth it needed to be born alive.
“Fetal growth restriction increases the risk of intrauterine demise or neonatal death.”
He also added that Brooke “described Annabelle's appearance as being really white – and in my experience when you deliver a healthy newborn, they're almost purple.”
At the trial, prosecutors claimed Brooke was a teenager of vanity and selfishness who wanted to maintain her picture-perfect life and illusion, so she hid her pregnancy and killed her baby, burned and buried the remains. The defense tore this down with the coroner’s retraction that also added there was no evidence the baby was even born alive. There was no physical evidence to back up the prosecutor’s claims. The jury agreed. After a four-hour deliberation, they acquitted her of murder and manslaughter, instead opting to convict her of gross abuse of a corpse, given time served and probation.
Brooke has since entered a treatment for eating disorders and as of 2020, worked for the law offices of the attorneys who represented her. Her eating disorder hit rock bottom during the trial, her parents said, but she has found a purpose again with working.
Final Thoughts
This specific filicide motive is tangled in complications, mental illness, tokophobia, and isn’t nearly as black and white as people want to make it out to be. Two cases I reviewed were older women who were more than capable of getting abortions or using contraception and for whatever reason, chose not to. Why Megan spared some of her children (the teenagers) and not others could be an indication of how bad her addictions were at the time. Meredith, on the other hand, didn’t have any reported addiction or primary mental health problems (none that have been reported, anyway).
As for Brooke, she was young and battling a severe eating disorder. I believe her. I don’t think she intentionally killed the baby. Her need to keep secrets spiraled out of control, her eating disorder was out of control, and it all ended with devastating results.
I originally wrote this on Medium shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, effectively ending the constitutional right to abortion for women. And I remember spending days deciding on whether or not to bring the topic of abortion into the article at all. But we must.
The truth is, the most effective way to decrease unwanted child filicide is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and if that prevention fails, to provide access to safe and legal abortions.
What’s better: allowing a woman to have say over her body and the choice to abort early on in the pregnancy, or forcing her to give birth, risking physical health, postpartum depression or psychosis, and the chance she might murder her child anyway? Or seek abortions where it might be dangerous and fatal once more? Preventing her from using contraceptives to avoid an abortion and unwanted pregnancy altogether? Do we, as a society, really want to return to finding baby corpses in the streets?
When women have no choice, they will always find ways. History has shown this. And this decision reversal begins to look awfully and horrifically familiar. We cannot discuss filicide without including the discussion on women’s reproductive rights, as it falls right into the “Unwanted Child” motive of filicide.
In fact, California has seen a drastic drop in infanticide cases in the last decade. According to the Desert Sun, the number of infanticides in the state sat at 133 in 1991, and dropped to forty in 2020.
California introduced a safe haven law in 2001, as many states did, allowing parents to anonymously surrender infants three days old or younger without prosecution. The Desert Sun goes on to say:
“More than 1,000 California infants have been safely surrendered since the law went into effect, according to the California Department of Social Services. The number of infants found recklessly abandoned statewide fell from an average of 18 a year from 2001 through 2005 to an average of two a year from 2015 through 2019. And the number of abandoned babies who died went from 52 in 2001-05 to zero in 2015-19.”
Zero. What a number!
Better access to family planning and access to abortion is also being credited for this huge drop in infant abandonment and infanticide. It’s brilliant progress that lends empathy and options to mothers who feel cornered with a child they didn’t want or cannot take care of. The birth rate in California has also dropped, seeing women wait until they’re older and more mature to have kids. Safe haven laws, family planning education, and abortion access, collectively, save lives.
We don’t need to go backwards to save the lives of children. California has proven this. (And no, the 2022 rumors that California is legalizing infanticide are NOT true, and I’ll link to it below.) We can prevent infanticides and abandonment with all of the above, and more resources that help mothers after they give birth. Having social workers and therapists available for mothers to turn to when they’re overwhelmed or showing mental illness setting in, could prevent many of these cases. No mother should be released from the hospital and simply left to navigate new motherhood alone. Early treatment for mental illness and simply knowing she isn’t on her own could do wonders. We can do better. We need to.
Relevant cases:
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Sources
"Sin of the Age": Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London by Ann R. Higginbotham
Tokophobia: A dread of pregnancy; Manjeet Singh Bhatia and Anurag Jhanjee; 2012
Meredith Borowiec
Megan Huntsman
Brooke Skylar Richardson
California