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What horrible,sad stories. Those poor innocent babies. Seems like we are seeing more & more of these stories! I don't know about these particular stories,but Post Partum Psychosis is a VERY real mental illness. I beleive the woman in Texas who drowned all her children in the bathtub had it for SURE,Andrea Yates. I never believed such a thing existed,until I had my 4th child. I had never experianced PPD w/ my and experianced it myself. I believe it was due to a VERY tramatic emergency C-section where I almost lost both my baby & my life combined w/ severe sleep deprivation. I was actually hallucinating,seeing weird things that I KNEW weren't really there! It was pretty frightening,but at least I KNEW I was seeing things. I began to get completely OBSESSED & paranoid that I'd drop the baby! I was really a wreck. I never experianced anything like that w/ the other 3 kids,but they were all born naturally. I think the CS really threw my hormones WAY out of whack! There were days I was ready to check myself into the mental hospital,no joke!
WHen he was 5 weeks old,I discovered that I still had milk,& began breastfeeding,and the symptoms got dramatically better! I still struggle w/ traces of PPD now,and the baby is 17 months old. I worry about all those other moms out there who do not have health insurance and CAN'T go for help. In my case,my husband got laid off during my pregnancy so we lost our insurance. I wish I knew another way but Omega 3 fish oil seems to help some.
May be mental illness...may be this new attitude of 'me me me me' that has become ever so pervasive. With that attitude, how could you even put your child's need above your own?
As someone else already pointed out, infanticide has been around for a long, long time across cultures and for many different reasons (and many of the same). I'd say it was probably even more prevalent in other times outside of this apparent "me me me" culture.
And yes, mothers who take wonderful care of their children are found in the human world AND the rat world. Mothers who kill them are found in both as well. So we could say a "good mother" is no different than a rat too.
I think people should be well versed in multiple options in case they are too stupid to not use protection.
I also think the Safe Haven law is severely flawed. As soon as a women drops off her kid at one of these places it is plastered all over the news in some cases they say things like "Investigators are looking for the mother" but wait I thought it was no questions asked. That freaks out a lot of women from going that route.
So murdering the child raises less attention?
(I get what your saying - we aren't talking about rational thought but instead selfish behaviors...but really...one is a better option than the other.)
Mental illness is just that...a MENTAL illness...a person's mind is not functioning normally. Unless any of us on here have a true & severe mental illness, I do not think we can sit in judgement of those who do. Women who kill their children, most, if not all the time, have severe issues that most of us have never grown up with or currently deal with while raising children.
You're right. I can't think of any other reason why a parent would end up doing something like this. This just happened in Orange County, where the mother of a seven-month-old dropped her baby out of a 4-story parking lot structure. Why isn't there more help for those who suffer from post-partum depression and/or psychosis? Husband of woman accused of killing baby defends his wife - latimes.com
I think there is no help for most women because most people do not believe PPP exists. I was one of those until I had my son. The first few weeks, I was so depressed I remember crying nonstop straight 6 hours and unable to explain to myself and my family why. It freaked me out so much and there were fleeting moments when I hated my baby so much, it would horrify me. It did get better after few months but I understood a mysterious tradition that my culture has. In my culture, new born mothers are never left alone for the first 40 days after the birth of their babies. When you think about it, there has to be a reason for the rise of such a tradition. While diagnosis is perhaps new, I don't think PPP is anything new. Having said that, there are parents who are selfish and evil. They abuse their kids intentionally and they should be punished severely.
I wonder if this could be related to stress, and lack of extended family support. There is so much pressure on women now, to be "Super Mom", work full time, and still be an excellent Mom, perfect wife, maybe some women try to keep up, and just go crazy. I know I did. Economic stress, I see more of this happening...and maybe tv watching sets up women to expect life to be better than it really is, they see women out having fun, and they are home with baby...
I wonder if this could be related to stress, and lack of extended family support. There is so much pressure on women now, to be "Super Mom", work full time, and still be an excellent Mom, perfect wife, maybe some women try to keep up, and just go crazy. I know I did. Economic stress, I see more of this happening...and maybe tv watching sets up women to expect life to be better than it really is, they see women out having fun, and they are home with baby...
In some cases, I think you're right, it is probably a lack of support from family. A lot of times these families seem to be quite isolated. People always ask, why didn't anybody say anything when it was happening, well in some cases there was nobody around to notice anything. Particularly when there's an abusive boyfriend/husband in the picture. Abusive men tend to cut their wives off from family and friends so that she depends on no one but him.
There are some cases of ignorance, lack of family support, stress, and postpartum psychosis, and there are also those of outright cruelty. The worst child abuse cases seem to be a family in which only one child is singled out for the worst torture. The mother, for whatever twisted reason, blames one child for all their woes and takes it out on them.
There's always a sad story behind each case, but when I hear about a dead, battered child, unless it's a clear case of mental illness it's hard for me to empathize much.
I wonder if this could be related to stress, and lack of extended family support...
In many cases it might be. But it also may exist--and tragedy may be averted--in cases in which the mother has financial and/or emotional support. You wonder about what might have happened to someone like Brooke Shields, who wrote a book about her postpartum depression, if she had not had access to help as a result of her education and awareness. That poor woman in Orange County who could no longer handle her baby had nothing. Brooke Shields' Struggle With Postpartum Depression
Terrible yes. But infanticide has been around since forever. Too bad these women are allowed to keep breeding though.
That's why I think that there should be a small cash award to all those who would voluntarily become sterilized. Maybe $400 cash to anyone 18 and over to have a tubal ligation or vasectomy. I think that would weed out a lot of these nutcases who will kill their own children.
Drug addicts would prefer the money over future kids, and many people just should never have children. Paying people to be sterilized would at least get a sizeable number of misfits out of the gene pool.
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