Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies: Infanticide in Canada

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University. She is the co-editor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario, and the author of Organizing Rural Women: The Federating
Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897–1919.

This is a challenging but rewarding study of the way in which Canada’s
criminal justice system responded to the killing of newborn infants
during the 20th century.

A new law covering infanticide was passed in 1948. Its purpose was to
bring some semblance of order to the complex issue of baby killing,
which included categories of offences that varied greatly, resistance on
the part of juries to indict or to convict women suspected of these
crimes, and problems with the medical evidence in these cases. The
infanticide law adopted in 1948 was intended to solve these problems and
to obtain convictions for the crime.

The author examines 100 years of legislative history of infanticide
law. To do this, she draws on a wide range of primary sources, including
case files and coroners’ records, and provides an interdisciplinary
discussion of infanticide in Canada. Kramar rejects traditional feminist
analysis of infanticide law, particularly the notion that patriarchal
law and medicine are deployed to control female sexuality.

She also rejects the way in which infanticide has been medicalized
through claims that women who kill their babies are mentally unstable.
Kramar argues that we must understand the conditions under which young
women kill their newborn infants. Not only are they as women
disadvantaged within patriarchal society, but they are women who often
find themselves abandoned by the men who should share responsibility for
the pregnancy. The women Kramar discusses in her work see themselves as
having few, if any, viable options—which is not to say they are
emotionally detached from the act of infanticide.

Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies makes a substantial contribution to
Canadian legal history.