siglo XX

The book invokes siglo XX as a turning point, most starkly in the history of caesarean birth: until that century, women who underwent the operation almost always died. From this medical contrast, the narrative widens to show that legal understandings of mothers who kill their children have changed on a different, uneven timetable. The period is therefore less a neat dividing line than a marker of how bodily risk, maternal responsibility, and criminal judgment are repeatedly redefined.

A medical threshold

The account of caesarean surgery makes the century boundary concrete. Until siglo XX, with only two or three documented exceptions, women who had a caesarean died from the operation. Some succumbed to immediate hemorrhage; others died days later from infection. The historical change implied by the passage is not simply a new medical procedure, but a changed prospect of survival for mothers.

That history sits beside a contemporary scene of childbirth’s bodily aftermath. Alice Espanet leaves the clinic in a car with Ritxi and their newborn daughter, while their son Alex remains in hospital. During the short drive, Alice is silent and visibly depleted as Ritxi’s attempted cheerfulness gives way to exhaustion. At a traffic light she unfastens the baby and her own seat belt, gets out carrying the child, and takes refuge in a doorway, singing a lullaby. The scene places modern medical care alongside continuing uncertainty about what birth and its aftermath may bring.

The changing law of maternal crime

The book traces another historical shift through infanticide law. In Victorian London, domestic servants who became pregnant after their employers’ seduction could be dismissed and left without support. Queen Victoria intervened so that women in such circumstances would not receive the death penalty for infanticide. The narrative presents this as the beginning of a recurring legal exception: the idea that a mother’s killing of a newborn should not be treated in the same way as homicide.

In Spain, infanticide remained a distinct offence from 1822 until 1995. The former law focused on a mother killing a newborn to conceal her dishonor, and also covered maternal grandparents who killed the child for the same reason. Later proposals would have replaced dishonor with the emotional strain associated with childbirth and the puerperium, with a proposed sentence of six months to six years. The 1995 Criminal Code abolished the separate offence; a mother who kills her baby can now be convicted of murder.

The comparison with Canada shows that legal change does not move uniformly toward a single standard. Canadian law, as described in the book, treats the killing of a child under one year old as infanticide when pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation has caused the mother’s altered state, and exempts the offence from punishment if mental disorder is demonstrated. The narrator criticizes the circularity of using the killing itself as evidence of that disorder, while noting that the law remains in force amid debate. Across these examples, maternal status can mitigate criminal responsibility, but the basis and consequences of that mitigation depend on the legal system and its era.

Diagnosis and responsibility in the present

The historical debate over maternal crime returns in the case of Alice Espanet. At trial, the prosecution questions the psychiatrist about the basis for diagnosing Alice with postpartum psychosis: there is no official diagnosis, and the assessment rests on her conduct and her own account, considered alongside the psychiatrist’s recent evaluations. The exchange exposes a central difficulty in assigning responsibility when the condition at issue is inferred from behavior and testimony rather than established by an official diagnosis.

The defense had already invoked Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts criminal responsibility when a psychological abnormality or disorder prevents a person from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. After the jury’s decision, the judge substituted psychiatric treatment for imprisonment and chose outpatient care rather than admission to a psychiatric institution. The book presents the outcome as part of a continuing debate over how criminal law should respond to mental illness, and over whether institutions can provide treatment without simply passing responsibility between courts and psychiatrists.

Motherhood in lived experience

The book’s present-day scenes keep these legal and medical categories from becoming abstractions. The Narrator describes the work of caring for Erik through changing diapers, repeated laundry, feeding, and the search for ever more elaborate ways to entertain him. She considers leaving him in daycare for longer, but worries about justifying the decision to Niclas, the educators, and herself. When she arrives at midday, Erik notices her, crawls toward her, and reaches up to be held. The intensity of their reunion makes her feel the abundance of maternal love, but also sharpens her doubt that she can enjoy or absorb that experience as she believes she should.

Mélanie’s testimony about working for Alice and Ritxi likewise resists a simple picture of maternal behavior. Her employer could supervise every detail of the babies’ care, from how they were held to how their diapers were changed, then withdraw to her studio and leave Mélanie in charge. Her moods and concerns shifted: she criticized the au pair’s actions, worried that the babies were gaining too little or too much weight, and fretted over their sleep. The testimony does not itself settle the question of diagnosis or responsibility; it supplies the unstable daily circumstances that the trial’s competing interpretations must explain.

The Narrator later describes motherhood not as an uncomplicated source of strength but as a condition of heightened vulnerability. During Erik’s lumbar puncture, she has to look away; the test confirms viral meningitis, and the family spends the night in hospital observing his persistent fever. Niclas tells her they are doing well, and she answers that they will do better, privately judging herself more harshly than his reassurance requires. Set beside the changing medical and legal frameworks, these scenes show why a century marker cannot resolve the book’s central tensions: survival, care, illness, and responsibility remain matters of specific bodies and relationships, not history alone.