Murderous Madonna: Femininity, Violence, and the Myth of Postpartum Mental Disorder in Cases of Maternal Infanticide and Filicide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In June of 2001, Andrea Yates drowned all of her five children in a bathtub in her suburban Texas home. Andrea Yates has since become the modern day poster child for maternal killings, which are commonly classified as either infanticide (the killing of an infant) or filicide (the killing of a child over the age of one). In the wake of Yates's case, the use of postpartum psychosis as a legal defense in cases of maternal infanticide and filicide has received considerable attention. Postpartum psychosis refers to a rare and serious mental disorder thought to occur after childbirth in some women. Despite the rare nature of postpartum psychosis, recent discussion tends erroneously to conflate all maternal killings with the disorder. Many scholars argue that the postpartum psychosis defense, along with other postpartum mental disorder defenses, should apply even more expansively to protect violent mothers from undue punishment. Some argue for changes in current laws, such as the development of a gender-specific insanity standard that caters to the intricacies of postpartum psychosis. Others support the enactment of an American Infanticide Act, which would automatically mitigate sanctions for mothers who kill. This Note argues that recent proposals are both unnecessary and misplaced, as they reflect outdated notions about female violence. Part I of this Note will explore the extent to which cultural values concerning femininity have influenced the societal response to infanticide and filicide. This section will provide an overview of feminist legal theory and its relation to cases involving mothers who kill. Part I will also address the role that traditional notions of femininity played in Yates's trials. Lastly, this section will describe the ways in which the American legal system has already incorporated popular misconceptions about female violence into its jurisprudence. Part II will outline the reasons why the states should avoid adopting an Infanticide Act. By critiquing existing Infanticide Acts in both England and Canada, this section will demonstrate that such statutes are not only premised upon the faulty presumption that all maternal killings result from the hormonal side effects of childbirth, but also reflect the misplaced belief that women should be treated lightly for violent crimes. Part III will argue that American jurisdictions should not develop gender-specific insanity standards for women suffering from postpartum psychosis because: (a) current gender-neutral insanity standards have proven effective in accommodating women who suffer from postpartum psychosis; (b) the use of a gender-specific standard promotes dangerous leniency toward female defendants; and (c) a gender-specific standard would embrace and perpetuate false ideas about women and violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".