Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (review)

Infanticide is a troubling concept and a challenging crime, as this book of thirteen collected essays makes clear by examining its historical treatment in England and a few other locations since the sixteenth century. Written by different authors who adopt a wide range of perspectives and methods and edited by Mark Jackson, Infanticide provides a stimulating introduction to what has evidently become a booming area of inquiry in Britain. The footnotes are replete with references to a large number of mainly English studies that examine the problem as part of a broad set of inquiries into the history of law, psychiatry, the female body, literature, and medical practices. As a result, the book can be quite difficult to read since it alludes to a number of different disciplinary projects, and its essays are uneven.

Despite these obstacles, the social significance of the crime of infanticide and the several issues to which it is attached makes many of the essays worthwhile. In distinguishing the killing of older children from the attempts to hide the birth of newborns, for example, Hilary Marland's essay on "puerperal insanity" opens up an entire episode of psychiatric treatment in Victorian England and the assumptions surrounding the potential insanity that was associated with the female experiences of birth and lactation. Similarly, Jonathan Andrews examines the records of inmates at two criminal lunatic asylums (in Perth and Broadmoor) to find how complicated were the calculations made in coming to decisions about the early release of inmates. The case histories are filled with reflections about environmental, hereditary, and social, as well as moral, contributions to insanity. In both these essays, women who killed their children were largely assumed to be insane. In this they were unlike the unfortunate girls who presumably killed their newborns to protect the secrecy of their pregnancies, viewed in England as a different sort of crime and much more the result of rational calculation.

Indeed, infanticide seems so enmeshed in a dense tangle of issues that the choice to organize this volume chronologically, while sometimes frustrating to the reader, may have been the only real solution for a subject whose many strands defy the neat principles associated with other forms of categorization. In part this choice also paralleled the process of legal changes that, in England though not in the United States, set a course toward treating infanticide as a special form of homicide: the changes allowed the British to punish the girls, usually unmarried and young, who sought to hide their pregnancy and then dispose of the child at birth, without outraging popular sentiment by inflicting the full force of a sentence of capital murder. This legal form of social control is often at issue in the volume, as are the complications it introduces into notions of criminal responsibility (also involved in cases in which insanity is pled) and the general problematic of determining whether a child was intentionally killed or stillborn. The English solved the problem starting in the eighteenth century by developing laws around the "concealment of birth." In this way, girls could be sentenced to prison (for a maximum of two years) and the state could continue to threaten them with punishment for their sexual misdeeds. Over time, English law has tried to finesse the many complications that arose from this differentiation between infanticide and murder, though it has rarely been entirely successful—as these essays show.

What was lost in legal clarity, however, has been gained by the shadows cast historically by the cases that were tried, since the very ambiguities help to expose large social, cultural, and gender issues into which the cases provide a tantalizing glimpse. My favorite is the South African case examined by Patricia van der Spuy in which the tangled web created by slavery, race, (possible...