Female Infanticide In Crimes Act 1961

Though infanticide sits in the Crimes Act 1961 as an offence, it operates as a defence for women to ameliorate their culpability. Infanticide acknowledges that women can be suffering from a mental illness such as postpartum depression, and hence, their responsibility should be reduced. Though bad mothering is always received with contempt, here it is subject to mental illness. However, the offence draws an arbitrary distinction for why women commit the crime. This is due to the fact that the notion of infanticide is contested, as it is often refers to the homicide of a child in the first year of life, whereas the Crimes Act 1961 looks at any child under the age of 10 (Friedman, Cavney & Resnick, 2012). The women must be suffering from a disturbance

The success of the defence gives only women a more lenient sentence, whereas men cannot use the provision and must rely on insanity. Yet, this creates the assumption that because men are not incorporated in the provision, they are evil for committing the exact same act of infanticide, even though men suffer mental illnesses postpartum at similar rates to women (West, Friedman & Resnick, 2009). With no infanticide defence, the conviction is typically murder or manslaughter which presumes a higher custodial sentence. In this regard, Stangle (2008) notes that the law protects feminine passivity to such an extent that it devalues men and holds them to a higher standard. However, Stangle fails to acknowledge that the same legislation implicitly values men by giving them agency. By removing men, it assumes that women who have given birth are more likely to have a ‘disturbance of the mind’. It becomes socially preferable to assume that infanticide is due to a mental instability rather than giving women agency and noting that killing a child is seen as a choice due to societal pressures such as shame. Thus, the exclusion of men reflects that female hysteria is alive and embedded in Infanticide Acts (Motz, 2010, as cited in Friedman, Cavney & Resnick, 2012). Feminists criticise that provisions on Infanticide actually pathologise childbirth and hence women, as by excluding men from the provision, though it does provide a more lenient sentence, it denies women the same level of agency that is credited to men (Friedman & Resnick,