When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  Another cause of postpartum psychosis may be manic-depression, or “bi-polar disorder.” As early as the 1930s, a handful of American psychiatrists came to see, in the life histories of women who experienced psychotic breaks, such as hallucinating that their baby was the devil, an underlying bipolar disorder, with swings downward into depression and upward into mania. Both psychologically and physically, childbirth could trigger an intense bipolar swing, far more dramatic than anything the woman had experienced before. In a manic psychotic state, a woman might kill her baby optimistically, as in the belief that the child will ascend straight to heaven and become an angel. Verlyn Harris, of northern California, slit her baby boy’s throat in imitation of Abraham’s sacrifice: “I thought that I would be seen as having God’s favor,” she explained. Angela Thompson of Sacramento drowned her nine-month-old son in his bath, hallucinating that he was Satan and her husband was Christ. “I believed … in order to expunge the world of the devil that I had to do this tremendous act of faith and drown my baby,” who would then be resurrected by her husband/Jesus. She added: “It was happening to me because of biochemical changes that were occurring in my body because I was weaning my baby at the time.” Thompson was borrowing from the vocabulary of motive, from the notion that biological mothering makes you crazy. Incidentally, she also described herself, at the time of the crime, as being “on a manic high.”

  When bipolar mothers suffer depressive psychotic breaks, feelings of nihilism and despair darken into intensely negative delusions. A baby who, for healthy mothers, might merely pose a threat becomes for these mothers a dragon who must be slain. In the 1970s, Dr. Stuart Asch saw the movie Rosemary’s Baby, in which a woman gradually realizes that the fetus she is carrying is not human but demonic. It struck him as an interesting depiction of depressive psychosis. The key, he says, is the specificity of Rosemary’s psychotic obsession with the baby within her, the idea that this child is the devil. “Women who are depressed, postpartum,” he says, “are conceiving of their children as the bad part of themselves, because children are an extension of themselves. By killing them, they get the rottenness out. It’s not hormonal at all.” His is a psychoanalytic perspective. Others, in this bright new era of Prozac, might argue that the affliction is mainly biochemical. Whatever its cause, manic-depression can be screened for, with high-risk mothers kept in the hospital in the weeks after the birth to ensure the infant’s safety. But virtually no hospital in North America will do this. According to both Dr. Asch and Dr. Stewart, it is a form of cultural heresy to suggest that mothers aren’t naturally good. Suspicion of harm interferes with our faith in the maternal ideal. “Mothers are supposed to be blissful,” says Stewart.

  Over the years, Stuart Asch has received hundreds of letters, some anonymous, all from American women who’ve killed their babies. They tell the same tale, of reaching out to relatives, pastors, doctors, only to be told, “It’s just the baby blues, you’ll be fine.” “The obstetrician would tell their husbands to go buy them a box of candy. One woman wrote to me saying that she had gone to her minister in desperation. He told her to be a good Christian. That afternoon she killed her child.” In another letter, the woman described smothering her baby, then discovering that her doctor had listed it as SIDS before she’d even had a chance to confess. Sheryl Massip tried for two weeks, before she ran over her son, to get doctors’ attention, even trying to admit her son back into the hospital, where he would be safe from her. With the trend among health maintenance organizations toward overnight stays for mothers who give birth, the women that Asch was able to observe rather carefully in 1950s maternity wards would no longer even attract attention.

  Women who suffer from postpartum depression fall into a different group from those with exhaustion psychosis or manic-depression. They don’t lose touch with reality. They find themselves, instead, overwhelmed by its implications. “Pregnancy and the transition to motherhood arouse many psychologic stresses,” note Dr. Stewart and C. E. Robinson in a recent article. “A woman must come to terms with changes in her body image, her relationships with her husband and parents, her responsibilities as well as society’s perception of her role. Jealousy and hostility toward the infant and fear of losing her identity are common feelings as she makes the adjustment.” Stewart and Robinson cite the example of a professional woman who gave birth to twins. “She had long-standing marital problems and was ambivalent about having children. After leaving the hospital, she became increasingly depressed and anxious.” One month later, the woman was rehospitalized, given antidepressants, and treated in psychotherapy. While she was able to work through “her relationship with her husband and mother, her fears of losing her career and becoming trapped and dependent,” she never did bond with her babies.

  Queen Victoria apparently succumbed to severe depression after the birth of the Prince of Wales. Being a queen, she was able to sit listlessly about under a dark cloud without changing diapers. Not so most women. Infant and child neglect are probably the most common results of severe maternal depression, far more widespread than infanticide and far more problematic for the culture as a whole. With child abuse, a parent actively attacks the child, but in neglect, as psychologist Brandt Steele notes, “The parent may decide it is a hopeless task, the infant is beyond help, too worthless and unrewarding to bother with; there is no longer any point in caring for it or about it, and the picture of neglect ensues. In general, neglecting caretakers, mostly mothers, tend to be more depressed, listless, hopeless, and more isolated, with their aggression more deeply submerged.”

  For Paula Sims, of southwestern Illinois, there was no support from a hospital, no intervention with antidepressants or psychotherapy. She lived penned in in a remote rural home. Over the course of a few years, Sims gave birth to two baby daughters. In each case, after a few months alone in her hauntingly empty home with her baby, popping tranquilizers, pacing, she drowned her daughters in their baby bath tub. Not directly: She didn’t hold them under the water; she wasn’t murdering them. She just went downstairs, poured herself a drink, and lingered in the living room, blown away by what she knew she was doing—which was letting each baby slide downward beneath the water’s tepid surface. Sims managed to persuade her community and her husband that the first daughter had been kidnapped. The second time a baby “vanished” with a “masked intruder” from her house, the police wouldn’t buy it. The found her daughter buried in the woods behind her home, and Sims was charged with murder. For duping her community, she received a life sentence. Having said nothing at her trial, Sims later phoned a journalist from prison and tried to explain for the first time what had happened. It was hard to articulate. It was like a compulsion, which began with what Dr. Stuart Asch might call “crazy thoughts.” Images of her daughters dead and gone. “I was like I gotta do this. I gotta do it. I cannot handle things. I’m a failure.… It just seemed like a dead end. I thought this was a way out, to end it.”

  Paula Sims did not speak to anyone about what had happened until she came across some literature on postpartum psychosis in prison and felt maybe that was what had happened to her. She had found her vocabulary of motive, and maybe she was right, as the Marce Society would argue. Or maybe it is just simpler to believe that she’d been insane, that she hadn’t taken action in order to wrest herself free of a stifling life.

  Around the time of Susan Smith’s trial for drowning her two small boys in a South Carolina lake, CNN’s “Talk Back Live” broadcast an hour-long show on infanticide. Smith did not commit infanticide, insofar as her older son was beyond the age bracket defining the crime. But she proved a springboard for an audience discussion that focused mainly on cases like Paula Sims’s. CNN’s Susan Rook urged the lifting of women like Sims out of social isolation, and accepting that not all women want to be mothers. The audience was supportive of this view, but they asked: Why don’t these mothers give the babies to women who are waiting to adopt one? Why, instead of destroying them, don’t they offer them as gifts
to someone else? In fact, in several cultures, the extended family is alive and well and takes over where individuals must leave off, so that often aunts and uncles and grandparents raise children. In North America, on the whole, isolation is a much more dominant feature of family life. Perhaps women can’t concede their collapse as mothers when no one is around to intervene. But a more complex set of psychological factors is also at work in some cases. If a child can thrive without his or her mother, the mother perceives herself as an abject failure when held up against the maternal ideal, a self-concept that becomes intolerable. When, in the late 1980s, Asch testified at the multiple murder trial of New Yorker Anne Green, who’d killed two of her infants and tried to kill a third, he was asked on the stand, “Would you let this woman baby-sit your children?” “Yes,” he said, “they’re my children, they’re not her children.”

  Murder-suicides are the direct consequence of a mother who perceives herself to have failed. She has much in common with the father who gets fired from his job or can’t break an alcohol addiction and comes home to kill his family and himself. A mother who takes her children with her into a garage and lets the carbon monoxide flow is doing so in much the same spirit.

  As with spousal homicide, however, fathers are more likely to engage in murder-suicides than mothers, whereas mothers are more likely to borrow suicidal intent as an explanation after the fact. Lieutenant Gierasch can recall only one murder-suicide in Suffolk County, in which a policeman’s wife killed herself and her child. Of eighty-eight infanticidal women in a 1988 study by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, only two killed themselves. Significantly, of all English women admitted to London’s Broadmoor Hospital between 1919 and 1969 for having committed infanticide, 49 percent had attempted or threatened suicide at the time of the offense.

  Scholars sometimes describe infanticide as suicide by proxy and argue that it is altruistically motivated, meaning that the woman is not being possessive and selfish in taking children with her or sending them off to death on their own but believes she is tenderly protecting them from hardship. “It may seem paradoxical,” a British psychiatrist and the first to lay out this view wrote at the turn of the century, “but it is not vice that leads to the death of the infant, rather is it morbid and mistaken maternal solicitude.” Nearly one hundred years later, this idea swirled around the death penalty case of Guinevere Garcia in Illinois, when Bianca Jagger and others told the Board of Review why she shouldn’t be executed. Garcia’s drunken smothering of her daughter was attributed to her “fear that her uncle would gain custody of the girl and molest her.” The rather clear implication of describing this sort of murder as “mistaken maternal solicitude” is that women are well-meaning but dumb. They don’t think logically. Death is a “mistaken” act of nurturance. By contrast, when a sample of men convicted of infanticide were surveyed in Brixton Prison in Great Britain, those who offered altruistic motivations were scoffed at. Wrote their interviewer: “The statement ‘that it was best for the children’ … is an expression of the fact that the perpetrator himself thought that the infanticide was the best way out—that is to say, the act was egosyntonic.” It served his purposes, not the children’s. Whether altruism is, truly, at the heart of some infanticides is a matter for research and debate, as is the question of why female suicidal intent rarely turns into suicide in fact. The closest anyone has come through imaginative power to describing altruistic infanticide is Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, about an escaped slave, Sethe, who slits her baby daughter’s throat so that she will never be enslaved. This was not uncommon in the antebellum South, and Morrison reportedly based her novel on a real case. Even here, though, “altruism” is a somewhat misleading word. As the writer Jennifer Uglow points out, “Sethe could not have killed her child unless she thought she owned her.”

  In 1989, Lifetime Television ran a documentary called “Postpartum: Beyond the Blues,” narrated by Susan Sarandon. The objective was to expose “the insensitivity of the U.S. court system to mothers who are more victim than victimizer.” The problem with the court system, however, is not that people can’t see women as victims—precisely the opposite was true in Amy Ellwood’s case. The problem is that the response to the crime is so philosophically incoherent and laden with sentiment that the jurisprudence is ambivalent, uncertain of itself. On CNN’s “Talk Back Live” show, the psychologist Patricia Singleton informed the audience that “when a woman is incarcerated for this crime, she generally is punished more severely than a man.” In truth, it only tends to be women who dupe the public into pitying them for a lost or kidnapped baby who receive severe punishment when the truth comes out, as happened to Susan Smith and Paula Sims. Most women aren’t incarcerated for infanticide. Of those who are even convicted, about two thirds avoid prison, and the rest receive an average sentence of seven years. In England between 1982 and 1989, fewer than 10 percent of mothers convicted of manslaughter for killing their children (at any age) were imprisoned; only two of the mothers who’d committed infanticide were. British fathers were more likely to be charged with murder than manslaughter. Over half of the fathers convicted of manslaughter went to jail. Three times as many mothers as fathers are deemed to be mentally ill for killing their children.

  We seem to permit a maternal sphere of influence over our youngest citizens, which recedes as children grow and enter the public domain. A woman who is acquitted of infanticide will not so easily escape censure for killing a child. Our collective sense of what is aggressive, of what we deem to be acceptable or unacceptable violence, is reflected in the comments of Suffolk County’s Lieutenant Gierasch: “To me, when girls have babies without anyone else effectively knowing—I don’t view it as aggression in the classic sense. My feelings aren’t so strong, personally, with respect to that. But young toddlers, children, if they’re the victims of outright homicide, is about as outrageous as I deal with.” The child, as opposed to the baby, is the most cherished of all potential victims in our society. This is why a postpartum mother may not, in her “hormonally induced” psychosis, attack an older child and still be considered “more victim than victimizer.”

  Juries frequently cry when delivering verdicts in infanticide cases—as they did at Amy Ellwood’s trial—regardless whether their decision is innocence or guilt. According to Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, juries are sympathetic in infanticide cases because “they view the mothers as having lost their most valuable possession already, in terms of the infant.” It is curious that Resnick should say “possession.” If children are regarded as citizens worthy of our protection, infants are perceived, on some level, as mere extensions of women—owned by them, as Uglow observed of Sethe.

  Suffolk County Court Judge Stuart Namm, known in legal circles on Long Island as a progressive who generally sympathizes with the poor and downtrodden before him, was not at all sympathetic to Amy Ellwood. He sensed a moral vacuum at the heart of the trial, an absence of cultural wisdom to sustain the overwhelming support for his defendant. If, at one time in history, cultures openly proclaimed their indifference to their newborn members, this wasn’t the time. A long-faced, gray-haired judge with thick, dark glasses, Namm gazed at Ellwood as she leaned into the protective arm of her lawyer. “This, Amy, was no miscarriage,” he began, urging her to give up the satisfying lie she’d told herself. “It was no abortion. It was no baptism. This was purely and simply an act of selfish and reckless manslaughter.” He turned his attention to her supporters, including Long Island’s most tireless victims’ rights advocate, who’d broken ranks in this instance to embrace Ellwood. “All of you believe that you are the real victims,” Namm said. “Well, I’m sorry. But I don’t agree.” He lectured Ellwood’s parents for failing to intervene when they knew she was pregnant. He criticized her lawyer for promising the “unwed mother syndrome” defense, which never materialized. He chastised the district attorney’s office for trying to plea-bargain down to probation, and he expr
essed anger at the Probation Department for offering a sixteen-page personal evaluation of Ellwood with extensive psychological analysis, which Namm had not requested.

  Judge Namm didn’t see any evidence that Michael James Ellwood had been valued. Sentiments about motherhood and young womanhood had together usurped a respect for the child. “It is my firm belief,” he told Ellwood, “that you have yet to come to grips with the tragedy.” No one, he said, “can callously take someone else’s life and walk away with a slap on the wrist.” He sentenced her to two and a half to seven and a half years in prison. Eric Naiburg appealed, and a New York State appellate judge permitted Ellwood to postpone prison until February 8, 1995, so that she could go to college.

  What would happen if we took the British route, and enshrined in law a homogeneous view of women as biologically prone to madness—as, by definition, insane to attack their own flesh and blood? As of 1993, only eighteen criminal cases in the United States involved a formal postpartum psychosis insanity defense, although women have been afforded this presumption less officially for years. Of all perpetrators who avoided prosecution for infant murder in Dade County, Florida, between 1956 and 1986 on a presumption of insanity, 83 percent were women. The British legal system invented postpartum insanity as we now understand it, much the same way that battered woman syndrome was tailored for U.S. courts—to accommodate a collective sense that women should be treated lightly for certain crimes. With what result? An enlightened view of women’s lives? Postpartum psychosis was widely used in the nineteenth century in England as a reason why women shouldn’t vote. British criminologist Nigel Walker calls the laws that govern infanticide in his nation “myth-making by legislation.”