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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Kirsten Johnson Kramar, Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies: Infanticide in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press 2005)
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| THE TITLE OF Kirsten Johnson Kramar's book immediately piqued my interest as a feminist historian. It evokes disturbing challenges to powerfully gendered notions of women and the nation. "Normal" and "good" women welcomed motherhood, as much of the 19th- and 20th-century discourse from a wide swath of experts insisted. Robust and well-cared-for babies from "good" stock represented the bedrock of a strong nation, social reformers repeatedly argued. Infanticide marked a direct challenge to that goal, and infanticide law, traditional interpretations argued, issued forth the patriarchal state's disciplining power. Poor working- class women, both married and single, who failed to fulfill their roles by killing their newborn babies, were the primary targets. Kramar's nuanced examination of criminal justice treatment of infanticide over the 20th century, however, complicates this traditional reading of the state's complicity in criminalizing and medicalizing socially constructed notions of women's "deviance." |
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Johnson Kramar, a sociologist at the University of Winnipeg, challenges traditional interpretations of infanticide law by feminist scholars, such as Carol Smart, who cast it as a heavy-handed attempt by the state to medicalize deviance and control women's sexuality. Johnson Kramar argues that this interpretation is ahistorical and ignores the often idiosyncratic logic of criminal justice. These two forces, she shows us, must be considered in concert. Highlighting the criminal justice perspective, Johnson Kramar casts the infanticide provision as a necessary legal "end run" around juries' typical refusal to ask for the death penalty in cases brought before them. She asks her readers to rethink the state's motivation for introducing the infanticide provision in 1948. What was the response to women charged with killing their newborn babies before 1948, and what developed in legal wrangling afterward? Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical, sociological, and legal scholarship, the author relies on critical discourse analysis of a range of cases from the period before the 1948 infanticide provision was introduced and afterward, concluding with cases in the late 1990s. |
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The infanticide law was passed in Canada in 1948. Prior to this, Crown prosecutors could choose from a range of optional charges dealing with maternal neonaticide: murder, manslaughter, concealment, and neglect to obtain assistance in birth. Prosecutors were often thwarted in their attempts to secure the death sentence for women charged with killing their newborn babies. Since the burden to prove that a live-birth had preceded the alleged crime fell to the Crown, coroners' testimony became pivotal. If this burden was left unsatisfied, juries were likely to only permit charges against the women on lesser charges. The concealment charge tended to reign supreme before the 1948 provision and reflected a number of social factors: neonaticide was difficult to detect, particularly in an era of widespread home births with few if any attendants; legal proof both of live infant birth and willful intents had to be firmly established; and juries tended to recoil from invoking the death penalty. Johnson Kramar argues that this was due in considerable part to juries' sympathizing with the females accused. Infanticide, she contends, was interpreted by juries as a "social" crime in which the killing of newly born babies was placed in "socio-economic context." At trials, issues of poverty, social shaming, as well as the "unique experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation" were routinely discussed. Juries, according to her, were often sympathetic to the women accused, particularly because they were understood as victims of inordinate and unforgiving social pressure not to have illegitimate babies. |
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In order to address what it perceived as lost convictions, the House of Commons adopted the infanticide provision so that consistency of conviction might be assured. Johnson Kramar argues then that the development of the infanticide provision did not reflect new medical, social, or psychological thinking. Rather, it was a strategic crime prevention move. No longer able to draw on lesser charges of concealment of birth or neglect at birth, defendants, it was hoped, would have fewer "outs." In 1955, the infanticide law was amended so that prosecutors no longer had to prove both intent and "reproductive mental disturbance." After 1955, live birth and intent were the focus. |
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There are contemporary trends that this book is intended to trouble and disrupt. In particular, Johnson Kramar is concerned about current tendencies to charge young women who are alleged to have killed their newborn babies under the new category of "child abuse homicide." Weaving from past to present, Johnson Kramar's overarching concern, and her motivation for utilizing a historical perspective on infanticide law, is succinctly offered in the introductory chapter: "the feminist discourse on women's reproductive responsibility, advanced in order to secure freedom of choice and to decriminalize abortion, has been appropriated by law and order advocates and incorporated into legal discourse in order to further retributive aims directed on women on behalf of the baby ... [who ] ... in turn, has acquired quasi-legal status." (14) In the context of the fate of the infanticide provision, she maps out why feminist activism needs to counteract the erosion of women's legal standing and the overarching context of social inequality in which women become pregnant. |
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Johnson Kramar's study helpfully makes feminist scholars rethink the complicated connections between the state's interest in protecting and policing reproduction, the protection of children, and the burden on particularly poor single mothers. There are some notes of caution. In explaining the tendency for juries to decry the death penalty for neonaticide, she argues that in the early 20th century "people sympathized with the everyday hardships faced by single mothers with illegitimate babies, and they understood that there were extreme economic and emotional hardships connected to raising babies for single working-class mothers." (14) Surely this overstates the case. Expressions of mercy in legal cases need not reflect a larger sympathetic attitude to infant killing by unwilling mothers. If such sympathies were indeed widely held, single motherhood would have carried little social stigma or economic hardship over the 20th century. But this was clearly not the case as the work of Margaret Little has demonstrated. Single motherhood was routinely punished, and continues to be punished, in both subtle and overt ways in Canadian society. That the death penalty was deemed abhorrent to juries need not be equated with increased sympathy for killing newborns. |
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Similarly, her cautions about conservative- driven agendas shaping current cases of newborn killing are provocative but perhaps raise more questions than offer conclusions. The federal government's contemporary desire to replace the infanticide provision with "death by child abuse/neglect," according to Johnson Kramar, marks the supremacy of infant rights at the expense of the mother. But this raises uncomfortable questions, first about the difference between the value of the life of an infant versus the value of the life of a child, and, second, about the value of infant life outside the courtroom and penitentiary. If contemporary child poverty indicators for Canada are to be believed, for example, widespread trends towards heightened protection of children are complicated at best in this country. Perhaps like the 1948 infanticide law provision, the charge of child abuse/neglect is best understood as a legal convenience, and less an attempt to discipline women. This study is nevertheless an excellent reminder that the law reflects and challenges the values society embraces. It also has a habit of turning in on itself and pursing its own idiosyncratic agenda, quite apart from and often against the interests of those it is expected to serve and protect. |
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Mona Gleason
University of British Columbia |
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