When was infanticide outlawed

On 15 March , Sofina Nikat, charged with murder, admitted in a Melbourne court to killing her month-old daughter and disposing of her body in a nearby creek. She did not, however, plead guilty to murder. How was this possible? This law applied only to illegitimate children and was based on the assumption that any unwed mother who tried to conceal the body of her child must be guilty of murder.

It meant that mothers who tried to hide the body of their child could be found guilty of murder even if it could be medically proved that the child was stillborn or died of natural causes. To avoid conviction a mother needed an eyewitness to the birth who could prove that the child was stillborn. As most unmarried women naturally tried to give birth in secret, this meant that they were extremely vulnerable to being found guilty, and therefore to the death penalty, if their child died.

The harshness of the Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was not welcomed by juries who were often reluctant to commit on a capital charge when a live birth could not be proved.

In , the law was replaced with a new Act, which made it necessary to prove that a child had been born alive before a mother could be charged with murder and introduced the alternative and lesser charge of concealment of birth.

Women acquitted of murder could now be charged with concealment of birth and sentenced to two years imprisonment. As with the previous Act, the new legislation applied only to unwed mothers. In the newly settled colonies of Australia, as in Britain, infanticide was not an uncommon solution for a problem that many women must have found overwhelming. However, these figures do not reflect the true extent of infanticide during that time. This was a hidden crime, taking place in private and domestic spaces, with the tiny bodies easily disposed of.

Infanticide continued seemingly unabated during the nineteenth century. In the Perth Gazette and Western Australian Times wrote the nipping of children in the bud -in other words infanticide, is a fashionable crime just now. Our quiet squares, the dark corners of our streets, our door steps, and sundry other localities, are the public depositories selected by travailling maids and unnatural mothers for the abandonment and desertion of their infants.

The bodies of tiny babies were discovered in water closets, parcels, sacks and boxes. They were secreted in ships, dropped down wells and discovered in earth closets. Often, they were wrapped in the feminine trappings of domesticity: petticoats, chemises, shawls or pillow cases. In in South Australia, Hannah Tetley, a domestic servant, sewed the body of her baby, into a black apron and dropped it into the water closet. The birth of a child at that time could spell both social and economic disaster for unmarried women.

Nearly infants all died at Ashkelon at about the same full-term age. They were not buried, but instead were cast into a sewer that ran beneath a brothel. Researchers suspect that most such victims were suffocated to death. Although the Hambleden babies were buried, their age distribution matched that of the infants at Ashkelon.

The findings add to the growing body of evidence that infanticide was common in the Roman Empire. A survey of human societies determined that 80 percent of them, at some time in the past or more modern times, practiced this intentional killing of babies. Gwen Hunnicutt of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Gary LaFree of the University of Maryland, College Park, have extensively studied infanticide, directing their attention to more recent documented cases from 27 countries around the world.

Hunnicutt and LaFree found what they conclude is "a positive relationship between income inequality and female infant homicide victimization. The researchers suggest that the practitioners may, in some cases, perceive infanticide as "mercy killing, where the goal may be to alleviate suffering, not to cause it. Hunnicutt and LaFree believe "increases in government support of family services, day care relief, and other types of parental support, might mitigate some negative effect of the economic impact of women in the labor force.

In Greece and Rome children's lives had little value, and the father's rights included killing his own children. The proportion of men greatly exceeding that of women found in many cultures and epochs suggests that girls suffered infanticide more often than boys. A kind of social birth, the ritual right to survive, rested on the procedure of name giving in the Roman culture and on the start of oral feeding in the Germanic tradition.