Infanticide in England and Scotland

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how infanticide, has been practiced throughout human history, but was made explicitly illegal during the seventeenth century throughout Europe. It looks at how, no longer charged as murder, infanticide was made its own capital crime, constructed to assume guilt, specifically targeting single women. It examines how the fact that it was deemed necessary to create and enforce the Infanticide Acts reveals the concerns of the society which produced them and how their enforcement reveals the desperate position of single pregnant women.

From the Paper:

"To lawmakers in the seventeenth century, infanticide was deemed important enough to create new laws that specifically discouraged the practice. Instead of dealing directly with the crime of killing an infant, these Acts, passed in England in 1624 and Scotland in 1690, focused on the concealment of an unmarried woman's pregnancy, differentiating it from a married woman's pregnancy. Under these Acts, the death of an illegitimate newborn was presumed to be the fault of the mother unless she had assistance during delivery or told at least one person that she was pregnant. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
• Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. "The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist's Perspective." American Journal of Sociology 86, issue 1 (July, 1980): 1-31.
• Blackstone, Sir William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago: Callaghan, 1884.
• Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Crime in England 1550-1800., ed. J.S. Cockburn. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1977.

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