Observations on some of the causes of infanticide / by George Greaves.

  • Greaves, George.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on some of the causes of infanticide / by George Greaves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    in the world or not. It being necessary to prove that it was entirely born, the prisoner was acquitted. The forms of law probably forbade the inquiry what motive could possibly lead a woman thus to mutilate the body of her still-born child. Common sense rejects, as a mon- strous improbability, the allegation that she had so mutilated it, and she need not have made it. It would have been an equally good defence, in law, had the woman alleged that, with her own hands, or by the aid of another, she had, when the head and shoulders only of the child were born, made the wound in its throat. The case would have been dramatically complete, had (we must not say the accessory, but) the assistant come forward to swear that the child was only partially born when the operation on its throat was performed. If the law as interpreted by the Judges is thus inefficient, its administration is still more lax. Juries are only too ready to go in the direction indicated, and, in spite of the strongest evidence of a criminal intention, to find the prisoner guilty of the minor offence of concealment only. And perhaps the feelings which influence them, in thus acting, are not all blameworthy. The extenuating circum- stances are doubtless numerous and weighty; the motives for con- cealment powerful. The combined effect of physical suffering, of dread of shame, of want of common necessaries, may, in a young woman not duly influenced by moral and religious principle, produce a state of desperation which, although it fall far short of the state of mind which removes moral responsibility, is equally remote from the set purpose implied in the idea of murder. Would not a verdict of manslaughter, as in other cases in which homicide is committed from sudden impulse, much better meet the requirements of justice, and relieve both Judges and Juries from the temptation to permit an atrocious crime to go almost unpunished? One further consideration which doubtless weighs with Juries is, that the law, besides being too severe, is unequal in its operation. The enactments of law and the customs of society permit him, who has frequently been the deliberate seducer of the woman, and sometimes particeps criminis in at least sug- gesting the killing of the child, to go scatheless. But of this more anon. Still, weighty as these different motives for clemency