Fourth century

The Fourth century is a hinge in the book’s history of infanticide: it marks the decline of a Roman legal order that permitted some parents to dispose of children and the emergence of a Christian view of infanticide as homicide. The shift is presented not as a clean break into moral progress, but as one turn in a longer history of laws that condemn child killing while assigning mothers, newborns, and mental illness unequal forms of protection and blame.

Roman practice and the turning point

Before this change, infanticide in Rome was described as both common and, until Christianity’s arrival, protected by law. The authority described in The Paterfamilias's Power over Children under the Twelve Tables allowed the head of a family to reject offspring born with defects. The practice also arose when a family could not—or did not want to—support a newborn, and when the child was a girl. The account thus locates the decision not only in private household authority but in a social order that could make a child’s survival contingent on sex, perceived condition, and resources.

The Fourth century supplies the chapter’s broad historical boundary rather than a single dated reform. The first Christian Roman emperor repudiated infanticide; after his death, the idea that it constituted homicide began to gain ground. The change matters because it alters the category through which the act is understood: a child killed by a parent is no longer treated simply as an object of household discretion, but as a victim of a crime. The narrative presents this development as a consequential shift in legal and moral framing, not as proof that the underlying conditions or practices vanished at once.

Condemnation and its contradictions

The growing rejection of infanticide did not produce an uncomplicated history of protection. The Church opposed the killing of children while, as the account stresses, condemning children born outside marriage to prolonged deprivation. Until well into the eighteenth century, such children lacked legal rights and protection and were burdened with the social stigma attached to their mothers. The contrast exposes a limit in the period’s moral transformation: a society could increasingly recognize the child as a person who must not be killed while still denying vulnerable children security and status.

The book also places the Roman-Christian shift alongside other religious and historical positions without treating them as identical. It notes that Qur'an 17:31's Prohibition on Killing Children for Fear of Poverty explicitly forbids killing children out of fear of poverty. Read together, these examples show that the history is not a simple progression in which one era discovers a universal rule; the account juxtaposes distinct forms of religious condemnation with the changing legal status of infanticide.

The long afterlife of the distinction

Later law repeatedly returned to the question of whether a mother who killed a newborn should be treated in the same way as any other person who committed homicide. In Britain, Queen Victoria intervened so that women who had killed infants would not receive the death penalty. In Spain, infanticide remained a separate offense from 1822 until the 1995 Criminal Code abolished that category. An earlier formulation tied the lesser offense to a mother’s attempt to conceal her dishonor; later proposals shifted attention toward the emotional strain of childbirth and the puerperal state. These later debates do not follow automatically from the Fourth-century change, but they show how unsettled the boundary between homicide and infanticide remained.

That history frames, without determining, the book’s account of Alice Espanet’s case. Her defense invoked Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts a person from criminal responsibility when a psychological disorder or disturbance prevents understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. During the trial, the psychiatrist acknowledged that his diagnosis of postpartum psychosis rested on Alice Espanet’s conduct and her own account, rather than an official diagnosis. The jury’s decision ultimately led the judge to replace imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment. Set against the long history traced from Roman household authority onward, the case brings the question of criminal responsibility back into view: the legal response depends not only on what happened, but on how the law understands the person who acted and the conditions surrounding the act.