The History and Social Structures of Infanticide

The History and Social Structures of Infanticide is the book’s historical and legal framework for considering the killing of children, including the case of Alice Espanet. Its central provocation is that infanticide is neither new nor explicable through a single image of monstrous violence: it has been enabled, normalized, excused, or hidden by social arrangements that determine whose lives are protected and who is held responsible. The account moves from ancient law and population control to contemporary violence and the courtroom, while distinguishing the ordinary contradictions of motherhood from the extreme act under investigation.

A history of vulnerability and control

The narrator begins by stressing the physical vulnerability of children: they are small, dependent, and unable to defend themselves. Killing can therefore take the form not only of direct violence but of omission—failure to shelter, feed, or care for a child, or abandonment. The distinction matters to the book’s argument: the act can be made to disappear into inaction, while its social causes remain harder to see. Historically, the narrator argues, children, like women and enslaved people, were often treated as their parents’ property rather than as independent persons with claims of their own.

Infanticide also appears in the account as a means of regulating births when reliable contraception was unavailable and abortion endangered the mother. The narrator invokes Ancient Rome, where people seeking to adopt a baby might look among the newborns left at a dump, and describes the practice as connected to decisions about whether a family could or wished to raise a child. The example makes abandonment part of a social system, not simply a private tragedy.

Selection by perceived worth forms another strand of this history. The Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus wrote guidance for judging which infants deserved to be raised, recommending that a child who failed the criteria be thrown into a river. In Sparta, the state inspected newborns and separated those considered fit to become soldiers from those deemed disposable. The narrator later draws a parallel with Nazi Germany: premature, paralyzed, or allegedly intellectually disabled newborns were sent to specialized wards, where a small dose of phenobarbital could kill them. Medical workers and midwives were required to report designated births; the narrator gives an approximate death toll of ten thousand babies. At the same time, abortion was illegal and women who performed or attempted it faced the death penalty. The contrast exposes a regime that could condemn women’s control over pregnancy while organizing the destruction of children it classified as unfit.

Law, honor, and the changing exception

In the narrator’s account of Roman law, the Twelve Tables explicitly gave the paterfamilias power to reject offspring born with defects. Infanticide remained commonplace through the Fourth century, including when a family could not support a newborn, did not want to raise one, or had a daughter. The history also includes child killing as religious sacrifice: examples range across Maya lands, Carthage, Celtic territories, and Siberia. The biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac serves as a further sign that the demand to kill a child could be presented within a religious framework without appearing wholly unimaginable to those involved.

The narrator also turns to rulers who ordered the killing of children, including the Pharaoh in the story of Moses and Herod of Judea, and to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire proposing that poor Irish families sell babies as food for the rich. The satire’s grotesque logic is set beside the narrator’s reference to mothers who resorted to cannibalism during famine in Ukraine under Stalin. Across these examples, children’s lives are shown as exposed to political power, scarcity, and arguments about whose survival counts.

As legal condemnation became stronger, the practice did not simply cease; the narrator says it moved underground. From the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, concealment of dishonor was a frequently invoked motive for killing a newborn. The story of Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust presents a literary instance: after giving birth following her relationship with Faust, she drowns the baby to hide her dishonor and is sentenced to death. The narrator then connects this literary pattern to Victorian London, where servants could lose their employment after becoming pregnant by their employers and be left destitute and publicly disgraced. Queen Victoria intervened so that women who committed infanticide would not automatically receive the death penalty. The resulting legal exception rested on a gendered distinction: killing a newborn by its mother was treated as something other than ordinary homicide.

Modern statutes and unequal judgments

The book traces that distinction through Spanish criminal law. In Spain, infanticide was a separate offense from homicide from 1822 until the 1995 Criminal Code. The former provision described a mother killing her newborn to conceal her dishonor, and also covered maternal grandparents who acted to conceal it. Later reform proposals shifted the rationale from dishonor toward emotional strain associated with childbirth and the puerperal state. When the separate offense disappeared in 1995, a mother who killed her baby could be convicted of murder. The shift changes the legal vocabulary, but the book’s history leaves open a broader question: how law defines a mother’s culpability, and what social assumptions are built into that definition.

Canada offers a contrasting legal model in the narrator’s discussion. Its infanticide provision applies when a woman kills a child under one year old while her mind is disturbed by pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation, and the narrator describes the offense as exempt from punishment. She criticizes the way evidence of disorder may become circular: the killing itself can be treated as proof that the mother’s mind was disturbed. The law was still in force while under debate, according to the account. The comparison with Spain shows that legal systems do not merely name an act; they also decide which circumstances mitigate responsibility and what kind of evidence counts.

The Alice Espanet case brings those questions into the present. Her defense invoked Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts a person from criminal responsibility when a psychological anomaly or disorder prevents understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. At trial, a psychiatrist acknowledged that the diagnosis of postpartum psychosis rested on Alice’s conduct and her own account, rather than on an official diagnosis. The exchange makes visible the evidentiary difficulty: mental illness must be assessed through testimony and behavior, while the legal outcome turns on whether it altered the accused’s capacity at the time of the crime.

The jury found Alice guilty but accepted the defense of insanity, and the judge replaced imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment. In the book’s account, this result raises questions about how criminal law handles mental illness and about the practical alternatives available to the justice system. A defense lawyer had argued for release from pretrial detention under the mental-disorder exemption; the eventual sentence likewise placed treatment, rather than prison, at the center of the legal response. The outcome does not settle the uncertainties about motive or inner experience. Instead, it shows how a case becomes a contest among legal categories, psychiatric judgments, and competing narratives of responsibility.

Contemporary violence and the frame of motherhood

The historical survey refuses to confine child killing to the past or to the supposedly uncivilized. The narrator cites the killing of four hundred children by the Israeli army in Gaza in the summer of 2014, estimates that children made up twenty-seven percent of deaths in attacks in Syria, and says that in Mexico City a child under five is killed every other day. She also notes that images of a drowned three-year-old refugee brought the refugee crisis to newspaper front pages without opening Europe’s borders for long. These examples set public horror against the continuation of violence: the suffering is made visible, but visibility alone does not stop it.

The narrator further turns from war to violence in the home, citing an annual total of 3,500 children killed through domestic violence in Europe. Against the familiar story of Medea, who kills her children to hurt the man who has abandoned her, the book argues that contemporary child killing in divorce conflicts is more often committed by men seeking to destroy the mother. It cites more than fifty men in Spain over the previous decade who killed their children during divorce proceedings in an effort to devastate their former partners. This reversal challenges the cultural habit of locating the most frightening threat to children in a mother, while leaving other forms of family violence less readily named.

The argument is sharpened by the narrator’s own account of motherhood, but the book does not equate exhaustion or ambivalence with violence. After becoming a mother, she describes feeling incomplete when walking alone, as if she had to explain that her identity was not visible without her baby. Three months without more than three consecutive hours of sleep, repeated weight checks, and close monitoring of the baby’s bodily functions leave her feeling that motherhood has driven her other identities into exile. Elsewhere, she writes about the boredom and repetitive labor of feeding, changing, settling, and checking on a baby, work that isolates and consumes the hours while receiving little social recognition.

That strain exists alongside attachment. When Erik sees his mother at nursery, he crawls toward her with delight and offers his arms; she recognizes the intensity of their physical closeness, yet doubts whether she can enjoy it as she thinks she should. She also wonders whether this contact with life will become visible in her writing. The juxtaposition makes maternal feeling plural: love, fatigue, guilt, and the wish for time apart can coexist. Those ordinary conflicts do not establish criminal intent or illness. They instead resist the ideal of the endlessly fulfilled, self-erasing mother, an ideal that can distort how the public imagines both care and culpability.

Evidence, uncertainty, and social structure

The narrator’s historical claims are interwoven with the reconstruction of a particular case. She describes combing newspaper archives, lawyers’ social media, current and former criminal codes, and forums where people seek legal help. The first hours after the deaths, the police procedure, forensic steps, and the investigating judge’s actions seem comparatively clear. Beyond that point, documentary certainty gives way to darkness. In particular, Ritxi’s decision to find Alice a strong defense lawyer after the twins’ cremation does not fit the expected role of a bereaved father seeking the harshest punishment. The narrator asks what might explain his choice but does not claim that the records answer the question.

That method is central to the concept’s significance. Infanticide is examined both as a concrete crime and as a category shaped by institutions: family authority, medical judgment, criminal statutes, social class, gender, and public attention. The book asks readers to look beyond the individual case without dissolving individual acts into historical generalities. Its movement between centuries and court testimony reveals how explanations change—from property and honor to eugenics, postpartum disorder, and criminal responsibility—while the underlying struggle over children’s vulnerability and the mother’s accountability remains unresolved.