Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

The Psychology of Infanticide

How could anyone kill her own newborn child?

If you talk to pregnant women or read accounts of what they say to friends and counselors, you'll notice a pattern. Those who are happy to be pregnant and expect to give birth describe what they're carrying as a baby. Those who don't want to be pregnant and are seeking or contemplating abortion avoid that word. Given the same thing at the same stage of development, we see what we want to see: a child if we want a child, an unformed embryo if we don't.

I like to think this subjective mentality is confined to the pre-viable fetus or at least to pregnancy. But what if it isn't? What if, to some people, it extends to newborns?

Infanticide is rare but not as rare as you might think. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of infanticides in this country, defined as homicides of anyone under age 5, has ranged between 500 and 800 per year for the last three decades. Of these cases, about 40 percent involve children under the age of 1. If you have the stomach to read about such tragedies, here are articles about some of them: 2006 cases in Georgia, South Dakota, and New York; two more New York cases in 2007; and a 2008 case in Texas. Serial infanticides are the most disturbing. Here's an alleged 2005 case in California, a 2007 case in Texas, and a 2008 case in Germany.

The latest horror story is unfolding in France. Edward Cody of the Washington Post reports:

Véronique Courjault, by her own admission, smothered the two babies after giving birth to them secretly in Seoul, the first in 2002 and the second in 2003. She also has acknowledged killing a newborn and burning the body in her garden after a first secret pregnancy in 1999 ... [A]s the presiding judge pressed for an explanation—the court will have to decide whether she knew what she was doing—she offered only vague clues as to what was going through her mind at the time. "What I did is so monstrous, without explanation," she responded, according to reports from the courtroom. "For me, those children did not have a real existence." Asked how she could carry the children for nine months and still feel they had no existence, she said, "I knew it, and then I no longer knew it."

This is the danger of denying that what you're carrying is a developing baby. Is your denial based on the undeveloped state of your pregnancy or on a determined refusal to see what you don't want to see? If it's the former, then at some point, if you continue the pregnancy, you'll start to see a baby. But if it's the latter, you might not. Your denial might extend all the way to birth or even beyond it.

That's one reason why, if you're unhappily pregnant, you should look at an ultrasound of what you're carrying. That goes for the potential father, too. Nobody can make you look, nobody should make you look, and you certainly should ignore bogus "information" scripts like the one concocted by a bunch of U.S. senators two years ago. But there's nothing bogus about an ultrasound. It will make you face what's growing inside you and the urgency of deciding whether to terminate it, even if termination is still the right choice. Otherwise, you risk sliding into the mentality of denial. And there's no telling where that ends.

The Temptation of Chastity Belts

Wow. Chastity belts.

Here's the report from Indonesia, courtesy of Paul Watson in Sunday's L.A. Times:

In a bid to prevent any hanky-panky between masseuses and their clients, several massage parlors ... are insisting that the women wear padlocks across the zippers of their work pants. ... [The instigating parlor owner] settled on black pants that zip up at the side, where a padlock is slipped through two cloth loops and snapped shut each time a masseuse meets a client. ... He stores the padlocks and keys in a special box at the cashier's counter. When a customer arrives for a massage, given in a private room behind a curtain, the "cashier calls one masseuse, asks her to prepare things and locks her pants," ... [and] "when the client is done, the masseuse comes to the cashier, and the cashier opens the padlock."
Several other parlor owners have supposedly decided to adopt similar locks. A local official says, "We expect this policy to be enacted as city legislation."

Any time somebody tries to take society back a few centuries, I like to know why. The instigating owner, Franky Setiawan, says he resorted to the belts because men "bombarded" his masseuses with sexual demands, and he wanted the women to feel safe. He says he and other owners have been looking for ways "to handle some naughty guests."

Ah. The old feminine-protection rationale.

The idea isn't crazy. To say that men often behave like pigs is to insult pigs. Boorishness, harassment, and sexual coercion are real problems. But let's think this through.

To begin with, there's the small problem of excretion. What the man thinks of as his—or some other guy's—way into the woman happens to be, rather more importantly, her way out. That's why, as Setiawan mentions, the masseuse "usually pees" before the cashier locks her pants. So, we're starting with a glaring engineering mistake: inconveniencing the victim more than the perpetrator.

Next, there's the political context. "In recent years, conservative Islamic values have gained influence" in Indonesia, Watson reports. "Last month, Indonesia's parliament passed a bill that makes it a crime to look at violent or pornographic material on the Internet. The penalty is up to three years in prison." So when Setiawan talks about how the chastity outfits will improve his industry's public image, you can see how workplace protection serves as a fig leaf for his awkward mix of puritanism and financial self-interest.

Finally, there's the telltale language of sexual paternalism. The problem with the some of the industry's male clients, according to Setiawan, is that "they try over and over and over again, persuading our workers with their dangerously sweet words."

Persuasion? Sweet words? This is the crisis? Words are intolerably coercive, but chastity belts aren't?

You can see how easy it is, as a paternalist, to talk yourself into absurdity. Once you get it into your head that motive is more important than method, you and your excellent motives are on the way to dystopia.

Before you deride the Indonesians, look at what's happening in the United States. Legislatures are passing laws right and left to mandate provision of ultrasound images to women seeking abortions. I support the idea of viewing an ultrasound before you make the decision. But when legislators add doctor scripts, patient viewing mandates, waiting periods, and other heavy-handed paternalist garbage, count me out.

Now comes a ballot initiative in Missouri that would hold doctors liable for "medical negligence" unless, prior to any abortion, they administer a formal psychological evaluation to ascertain whether the woman has been pressured into it. The measure's sponsors propose that women be asked: "Is someone else encouraging you to have this abortion? Do you want this abortion to satisfy your own needs or are you looking to do this to please someone else?" These questions are necessary because, as all paternalists know, women don't really want what they came to the clinic for. "The sad reality is that many abortion providers simply do abortions on request, no questions asked," the measure's sponsors lament. By failing to second-guess their patients, these providers fail "to help women in the ways they want and deserve."

I'm not saying coerced abortions never happen. There's clear evidence that they sometimes do. But you can see from the Missouri initiative how easily the notion of feminine vulnerability leads to interference dressed up as protection. And this is the crucial lesson of chastity belts, abortion regulation, and most other paternalist measures: The pressure from which you set out to protect women, bad as it may be, is seldom as ugly or coercive as the pressure your intervention imposes.