A few weeks ago I wrote about the Prince Albert baby who had been abandoned by his mother after being born head first in a toilet. To put it mildly, I was not sympathetic to this woman. A few readers took me to task for this, pointing out that she may have had post-partum depression.
I find this a little hard to swallow, because the “post” in “post-partum” means after, not during. One doesn’t suddenly acquire post-partum depression the minute the baby is pushed out; it takes a while for the hormones to kick in. Perhaps she was suffering from depression from another source, of course, but even so, I find the urge to exonerate her a bit strange.
To reiterate, this woman left her newborn baby head first in a toilet. It was a miracle that he survived at all. And yet many are trying to excuse her. If she was mentally ill, then by all means argue that in a court of law, but only after she has been charged with attempted murder.
For some reason, though, our society doesn’t like to blame women when they hurt their children. Two years ago in Toronto, Clara Dasilva was sentenced to three years for leaving her two-year-old daughter Adrianna alone for thirty-three hours in a sweltering apartment while Clara danced the night away and then went to work. The prosecution wanted ten to twelve years, but the judge felt that Clara posed no threat to society. Adrianna’s father, Mark Yetman, was outraged. “You go out and beat up a guy on the street corner, you get five or 10 years. You kill my kid, it’s totally fine,” he told reporters.
He has a point. Men who kill their children get harsher sentences than women who do the same thing. We figure a mom would never mean to deliberately kill her child, so she should be partially excused. And let’s not forget that her hormones may have been totally out of whack.
Does that latter line of argument sound familiar? It should. It’s what men used to say to deny women the vote for so long. It’s why the government attempted to keep women from being air traffic controllers or from joining the military. Women, you see, just didn’t have the right emotional make-up, and too often they weren’t stable. We women fought against that stereotype, and we won. We said “we can do anything a man can do!”, and people believed us. But now, when a woman does something bad, we pull out those same tired arguments and try to say it wasn’t her fault. You can’t have it both ways.
Either women are capable, competent people and we deserve to be taken seriously and treated equally; or there really is something about us that makes us perpetual victims and too often unstable. I am not trying to argue that men and women are the same. I think gender differences are very real, and I’m acutely uncomfortable with this idea that to succeed women need to act like men. But I’m equally uncomfortable with the idea that we are somehow not as morally culpable for our actions are men are. If anything, I would think we women should argue that we should be more morally culpable.
An almost universal phenomenon among mammals and birds is that mothers will die to protect their children. We humans have somehow grown past that, so that we can think only of ourselves, leading to horrendous cases like little Adrianna’s death. Again, if there are genuine issues of mental illness, then let those be mitigating factors at the trial. But at least charge her. Let’s start holding women responsible when their children are put in danger.
And it’s those children that we mustn’t forget. When a stranger kills a child, the grieving parents are there to demand justice. But when a mother kills her own child, too often there is no one left to remind us of the little baby that has been lost, and so our sympathy flows more to the mom. Those silent children deserve better, and I hope that we will stop excusing evil, and will instead expect all parents to act responsibly. Is that really too much to ask?
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