Infanticide different than murder: author

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This article was published 22/10/2014 (4215 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With as many as four dead newborns discovered at a storage facility in Winnipeg and no reports of missing infants, the questions remain: Who is their mother? And how did this happen?

Police wouldn’t release details of their investigation, but a Winnipeg sociologist who’s written a book on mothers who kill their babies has some ideas.

“These cases occur extremely rarely,” said Kirsten Kramar, a sociology professor at the University of Winnipeg and author of Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies: Infanticide in Canada.

She studied infanticide cases in Canada during the past 150 years, and said there’s a pattern. “It is generally the case where you find a young, often religious and marginalized woman who’s been sexually active and doesn’t want her family or friends to know she’s pregnant. She conceals the pregnancy and disposes of the baby at birth.”

She pointed to a recent case involving a woman in B.C. who killed two babies at birth and disposed of their remains.

In April, a Vancouver court found Sarah Leung, 28, guilty of two counts of infanticide. She delivered the babies into a toilet at home and then disposed of them in plastic bags she tossed in the garbage. She gave birth to her first son in April 2009 and the second son in March 2010. She cleaned up and hid the evidence in both cases before telling her boyfriend she had miscarried. Court heard Leung kept their relationship and her pregnancies a secret.

“She was a new immigrant from China, her family was very religious with very strict rules about dating and marriage,” said Kramar. “She was sexually active and found herself pregnant and disposed of the babies at birth.”

Moms who kill infants aren’t usually violent people, she said. Their most common methods are drowning, suffocation, strangulation and just leaving their baby to die, said Kramar.

“This isn’t about murder in the sense there’s any evil intention toward the child,” she said. “It’s completely different than murder.”

When a woman kills her newborn “it tends to be about concealing sexual activity,” she said. “When women kill their (older) children, it tends to be in situations where there’s acute mental distress,” she said. “There are cases in which women suffering from postpartum psychosis (in which) the women believe some kind of harm is going to come to the child and they’re avoiding the harm coming to the child.”

Kramar said the deaths of the babies discovered in Winnipeg Monday raises a serious and troubling question.

“How is it a woman can get pregnant four times and no one notices or does anything to support her?” She said with birth control widely available for most women, unwanted pregnancies still occur and women don’t feel they have any choice but to hide them and do away with the baby.

“In Canada, there is anywhere from zero cases to four or five in any given year,” said Kramar. “There are much fewer now than 100 years ago. We do now have access to birth control and abortion.”

But not every woman feels free to access reproductive choices: “Those 19th-century conditions still persist” for some women in some parts of Canada, she said. “We still have pockets of the population that are deeply religious. I don’t think you can get an abortion in Steinbach, Prince Edward Island and parts of Alberta.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca