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“A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono
Aug
14
On Neonaticide
Filed Under abortion, parenthood, pregnancy, rape and sexual assault, reproductive justice, sexual exploitation and harassment, women’s health | Posted by Cara |
The LA Times has an interesting article on a subject I admittedly know little about: neonaticide, or when a woman kills her newborn infant or leaves it to die. Of course, when stories like this emerge, the public is shocked, and the women who commit the crime are characterized as psychotic, evil, murdering wenches. In actuality, these women have something completely different in common, and it’s a deep denial that they are even pregnant.
Teenagers’ pregnancy denial may involve naive beliefs that morning sickness and weight gain are because of illness or excessive eating. But more often, denial is fed by shame over having intercourse, anxiety about enraged parents, fear of giving birth, or resentment about ruined future plans.
Pregnancy denial among adults often involves hiding infidelity, excessive ambivalence about abortion and even guilt about neonaticidal thoughts. For either age group, pregnancy caused by rape, especially incest, may produce realistic fears of retaliation by the rapist; denial may be a form of post-traumatic amnesia.
Pregnancy denial gives women some temporary emotional relief, but if it persists, it can cause lasting damage. The woman avoids prenatal care and delays making critical decisions about termination, adoption or motherhood. It’s rare, but a woman who keeps pregnancy secret for nine months is at much greater risk of killing the newborn when she is overwhelmed by the emotional and physical stresses of giving birth alone. If the baby is subsequently found, alive or dead, the woman’s continuing denial is often a desperate attempt to escape felony charges of child abandonment or murder.
How often does this happen? We don’t know. Neonaticides are among the least-well-documented deaths in the U.S. Many bodies — left in trash bins or buried in remote places — may never be found.
So, as this quote suggests, we really don’t know how often neonaticide occurs. It could be far more or less common than suspected. Media sensationalism could have very easily blown the story out of proportion. But regardless, it does happen. And I think that we owe it to these babies and these women to at least think about it for a few moments.
Certainly, I’m no psychologist, so I can’t do much more than pose questions. But I think that there are a lot of interesting ones here. For instance, can this type of extreme pregnancy denial be considered a form of mental illness? I imagine that such denial and deceit would necessarily involve a certain level of self-delusion, which would place a woman out of what we would generally consider a “sane” frame of mind. Whether it’s common enough that it deserves its own title, I obviously don’t know. But I also refuse to believe that all of these women are simply coldblooded killers. And if they’re not coldblooded killers, what exactly are they? Is throwing them in jail for the rest of their lives really the best way to deal with the situation?
No, I’m not condoning or excusing neonaticide. But I am wondering what the most fair and equitable way to deal with this phenomenon is– and that means not necessarily the way that makes the public feel instantly better and safer and righteous. We also have to remember that many of these women are victims of heinous sexual abuse, and are only pregnant because of that abuse.
For example, the article mentions that many states now have “safe surrender” laws, where mothers can leave their newborn babies at hospitals without risk of being charged with negligence or abandonment. I think that’s great, and if well known, a way to give women another option and to protect newborns. But what about the women? Great, the baby is safe. But we can’t simply act like the task is over at that point. We’re talking about women who are in deep denial about their own pregnancies, who feel lost, scared and confused enough to have not made any arrangements whatsoever, whether it be abortion, adoption or parenthood. Are we to deduce that most of them are in a safe and stable state of mind? I think that these women need and deserve the offer of help for themselves. If these women did have an option to seek counseling, wouldn’t it even be possible that some of them could become suitable mothers to the baby they surrendered? And can we really expect to save newborns without bothering to save the women? Shouldn’t we be fighting the problem at the source, not just finding ways to deal with it once it occurs?
I’m also really interested in the purported reasons for denial. If the ones listed above are accurate (and I’m not really sure how many studies have been done, so I maintain that as an if), I wouldn’t have any problem placing the blame on social conservatives and our puritanical society. Most of the listed reasons were based on shame and embarrassment about sex and a fear and shame surrounding abortion.
Obviously abortion would not be the right choice for all of these women, but surely it would have been the best option for many, if they felt that they had it available to them. “Available” doesn’t necessarily mean only that there’s a clinic nearby– it can also mean available in an emotional sense without fear of being ostracized by the community, having horrible side-effects (which anti-choicers notoriously lie about) and/or going to Hell. Wouldn’t abortion of an early pregnancy, or hell, even a second-term pregnancy, be an awful lot better than women giving birth to full-term babies by themselves, panicking and committing neonaticide?
And if abortion isn’t right for the woman in question, we’re still dealing with social pressures concerning sex– i.e., girls terrified to tell their parents that they’re pregnant because of their attitudes towards virginity until marriage. It’s obviously the absolute extreme end of the spectrum, but we certainly can’t want a society where girls feel that hiding their pregnancies out of despair and killing their newborns in a panic is a better option than telling their religious parents that they’re pregnant.
I can’t help but feel that this issue, as large or as small as it actually may be, is extremely intertwined with all of the problems in America surrounding sex education, our sexually obsessed/fearful culture, a really shitty approach to women’s health, and the apparent difficulty with treating women like full and equal human beings. I also can’t help but feel that “safe surrender” laws are only slightly more than a band aid over a tiny section of much larger, looming problems, and that all of us deserve a hell of a lot better.
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“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” — Susan B. Anthony
I think that one of the reasons why we don’t know more about these sorts of things is because the medical community hasn’t cared to find out. Consider how long it took the medical community to show the slightest interest in actually dealing with and researching postpartum disorders.
Another thing that I think makes this hard for people to deal with is that Americans tend to be reactionary, not preventative. Look at how much of our medical care goes towards treating, no preventing, illness. We don’t invest in preventative care at nearly the rate we respond to it. I think that this attitude is pervasive in our society. It shows up in the way we deal with crime, the way we educate our children, the way that we we treat health problems, etc etc. So, in a case like this. Lastly, I think that people are more comfortable treating these women like they’re monsters, which then limits the obligations we have towards helping them. If they’re monsters, then they’re not common, and we can treat them like monsters. Sick.
You’re absolutely right, though- safe surrender laws, while necessary, are nothing but a bandage on a much larger, more difficult problem.
I can understand that deep level of denial after incest and rape, but in other cases I assume the woman was not in very stable mental health to begin with, or that the denial has to do with something else. For example, would “anxiety about enraged parents” cause such denial in a healthy girl or woman if she didn’t expect the parents to beat the shit out of her?
And aside from the neonaticide, you also hear about women who say things like, “Oh I didn’t know I was pregnant til the baby slid down my leg.” Now, I’ve been pregnant and there’s no way that anyone in any kind of healthy frame of mind could fail to notice, particularly once labor starts. So this denial might explain those situations, too.
I think you’re underestimating the power of shame on the human psyche, dew. Kids, for the most part, really care about what their parent’s think of them, beatings or no. I have trouble letting my parents know if I’m having financial trouble, because I don’t want to dissapoint them by not being able to take care of myself: and I have wonderful, understanding, loving parents. I’ve seen friends with distant or demanding parents tie themselves into knots trying to get approval; intelligent women willing to major in a subject they hated and go on to do a career they felt trapped in because they were convince that doing otherwise meant their parents would be unhappy, even if their parents had never actually said this outright.
Cut to kids with parents who have explained to them over the years that only Good Girls are loved. These women will most likely strive to be said Good Girls, despite having normal wants as well. If they’re lucky, they’ll figure out that the GG meme is a crock and manage to throw of the need for parental approval, which something most people find VERY difficult. If they aren’t, they’ll survive as best they can. Extreme denial is a symptom of that survival: mommy and daddy still love me, so I must be a Good Girl! GGs don’t have sex! I can’t be pregnant!
I knew someone in this kind of denial; she was very young. One of her siblings took charge and got her an abortion, and it was like taking a kid to the doctor for an ear infection, or something. I mean, she just acted totally helpless, like a child, through the whole thing.
I don’t know WHAT she would have done if her sister had not intervened.
Fascinating post!
Has there ever been any solid research conducted into whether a woman can carry a baby to term and literally not realize that she’s pregnant? Is this physically possible in any circumstances? I’ve heard this claimed as reasons why labor and birth have come as a surprise to some women, and while I find it incredibly hard to believe (read: 99% impossible to believe), I wonder if this is something that COULD happen?
Women have certainly claimed that it happened to them. As I argue in the post, I think that this is probably much more extreme mental denial than a lack of physical symptoms.