Читать книгу Parents Who Kill - Shocking True Stories of The World's Most Evil Parents - Carol Anne Davis - Страница 9

Thirty infants a year are killed in Britain, mostly by their mothers. These women often conceal their pregnancies and give birth alone in their bedrooms or in semi-public settings such as a college bathroom or a hotel.

They do so for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the baby is the result of an affair which they’ve had whilst their husband was working away from home, and to admit to the pregnancy will end the marriage. In other instances, the girl is single and from a religious family which opposes pre-marital sex. Women with a previous history of mental illness are more likely to panic when they find out that they are expecting an unplanned and unwanted baby, as are those who are already under stress from existing life events.

The stereotype is of a teenage – or even younger – girl who has little understanding of biology, but many mothers who kill their children at birth are in their late teens or early twenties. They tend to be passive individuals with a desperate need to appear perfect to their parents and friends.

Though impoverished, uneducated girls are the most likely to give birth in secret and dispose of their babies immediately afterwards, it’s not unusual for high school pupils and university students to do likewise, preferring the extended pain of a medication-free birth to admitting the impending arrival of an illegitimate child.

If a mother murders her baby in its first 24 hours, the crime is neonaticide. In reality, most of these women snuff out the baby’s life – usually by strangulation or suffocation – when it gives its first cry. Others abandon the infant in a dustbin or under a bush in the park so that it dies of exposure. In America, such infants are often disposed of down the garbage chute. Some American prosecutors make no allowance for the new mother’s state of mind, so girls who kill their newborns can be given lengthy sentences for murder in the US.

The Infanticide Act, passed in Britain in 1922, recognises that childbirth and lactation can cause enormous hormonal shifts which result in temporary mental illness and can cause a mother to kill her baby. (The act isn’t applicable in Scotland, but Scottish judges tend to sentence along similar compassionate lines.) As such, women who commit neonaticide in the United Kingdom face, at worst, the charge of manslaughter.

The case which follows, that of British mother Caroline Beale, made headlines throughout the world when she secretly gave birth during a holiday in the United States and was caught attempting to take her dead baby back into Britain. The American legal system demanded a 25-year sentence whilst British authorities pleaded for clemency given her obvious fragility and confused state of mind.