That an ‘ordinary’ mother would murder her young seems to violate the natural order of things
THERE ARE few acts that appal as much as the death of a baby by its mother’s hand. Like the case of Frenchwoman Dominique Cottrez, who has admitted killing eight of her newborn babies, it seems to violate the natural order of things. It flies in the face of all concepts of motherhood. It casts doubt on that love we cherish most: the bond that we believe begins at birth evoked by a mother’s sight of her newborn baby.
What about the fierce protectiveness of a mother for her young? What about attachment? What about the mother-infant dyad and that unique relationship from the moment a woman even knows that she is pregnant? And why, we ask, would someone carry a baby until birth to kill it?
We may never know exactly what led Cottrez to murder her eight babies. That a mother could have inflicted death on her babies, not once but several times, precipitates a crisis of questions about how this could happen in an ordinary place, with ordinary people with grown-up children, whom other people thought they knew.
It is the sheer ordinariness of the people involved in such acts that alarms. We expect perpetrators of nefarious crimes to be identifiable. They should have characteristics that distinguish them from others, like vampire teeth, devil’s horns, sixes upon their foreheads or turn into werewolves at night. They should not be people like you and me.
When we encounter human acts that are inhuman we distance ourselves. We prefer if they occupy neat aberrant categories that confirm that neither we, nor anyone we know, could do this. We seek answers and hope that mental health professionals or sociologists will elucidate the reasons, the motivations, the pathology and the solutions to such happenings.
But life is not like that. People are more complex. Even in neonaticide there are different kinds of deaths. Not everything that occurs has an easy explanation. Not every societal ill can be cured. Not every situation can be anticipated and not every person can be monitored and policed into societal norms.
And neonaticide, the killing of the newborn, disturbs us especially, because it raises question about how we protect life at its beginning, who is responsible, what we know about the conditions in which women would harm their newborn babies and what we can do about it.
There is evolutionary ancestral evidence about the potential for mothers to harm their children for survival of the fittest, of the family and of the species. There is historical and cultural precedent for such acts when children were chattels, property to be kept or disposed of according to convenience.
Literature also acknowledges filicide. The Greek tragedy by Euripides, more than 400 years ago, offered Medea as the pinnacle of maternal infanticide, perturbing the people of its time as much as the subject upsets us today. And the image of motherhood is also shattered by Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth calling for “direst cruelty” and declaring that she would “dash her baby’s brains” rather than retract what she had sworn to do.
Research on neonaticide since the 1970s, when the term was first coined, identifies instances. There is sex-selective neonaticide, eugenic neonaticide, or it can occur when there is extramarital paternity, or in cultures where there is a one-child policy, where there is poverty, desperation or gender preference. And when we look at babies and wonder how anyone could harm such innocence, we cannot distance ourselves in Ireland from the death of many innocents here too.
Neonaticide has occurred when mothers have been unable to disclose pregnancy, when guilt and shame have surrounded the birth of a child “born out of wedlock”.
There has been neonaticide when pregnancies that were the result of incest or abuse had to be concealed and instances where families participated in disposing of the evidence that might bring the family into disrepute.
There has been neonaticide through abject ignorance, when young girls were startled by a baby emerging from their bodies: girls who never knew that they were pregnant, some who did not even know the facts of life.
But more usually, research indicates that neonaticide is an act committed alone by a young woman who is in such total denial about pregnancy that not until a baby appears is she panicked into decision making. That decision can be fatal in that time of crisis, of simultaneous psychological realisation and temporary dissociative state.
Accounts, such as the famous American “prom mom” case, often find that young mothers observed the delivery of their babies as if it was happening to someone else and that they had amnesia for a period after the event.
Death sometimes occurs because of passive neglect of what the newborn needs to survive or because of active violence against it, in some instances to stifle its cry because it brings concealment and denial of the pregnancy to an end.
This is why a number of American states and other countries have enacted “safe haven laws” to provide a place where if newborns are brought unharmed they may be left there without legal consequences for mothers.
While neonaticide may not be classified as due to mental illness or psychotic state, the more clinical insight we gain into the phenomenon the more we can ensure knowledge of predisposing signals of risk and give support during the process of pregnancy and especially birth to women which is a critical psychological event in their lives.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and director of psychology of the Student Counselling Services in UCD