Infanticide in 19th-century New Zealand

Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand was difficult to assess, and resultantly, many New Zealand women who might otherwise have been sentenced to penal servitude or capital punishment in New Zealand had their sentences commuted to the lesser charge of "concealment of birth" under the Offenses Against the Person Act 1867. However, this relative leniency only extended to mothers of concealed or hidden infants who subsequently passed away. Fathers, grandparents and "baby farmers" like Minnie Dean, the only woman to be executed in New Zealand history and Daniel Cooper in the 1920s, were viewed as more culpable for the death of such infants.

Context: Infant Mortality in Nineteenth Century New Zealand

In a recent volume on childbirth, pregnancy, infant mortality and infanticide in nineteenth century New Zealand, Alison Clarke places the deaths of newborn infants in colonial era nineteenth century New Zealand in historical context. Over the four decades (1861-1899) for which statistical evidence is available, an estimated cumulative 53,000 such infants perished in New Zealand. If the child was less than one month old, there may have been premature birth, without the complex life support technology available in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which would often prove invariably fatal due to the lack of sufficient infant respiratory development Other than that, newborn infants might also perish from sharing beds with their parents, who might roll over and smother them inadvertantly during sleep; negligent parental alcohol abuse and impaired standards of care and administration of alcohol to prevent infant cries; and the associated use of soporific drugs such as laudanum and chlorodyne

The Legal Context of Infanticide

Altogether, Clarke identifies ninety eight cases of deliberate or intentional infant death that resulted in legal proceedings. Of these, ninety four were undertaken against the mother of the deceased infant, while fourteen of these were also undertaken against the baby's father, grandparents or friends of the mother who had assisted in the birth and its concealment. Four involved the father of the deceased infant and another individual, often a grandparent. Usually, if the birth had been concealed, the maximum penalty was two years imprisonment, and as Bronwyn Dalley notes, women could often plead mitigating circumstances through male sexual coercion (a "seduction" narrative), although this was not always successful. Some women were convicted of infanticide or manslaughter in this context, although many others were acquitted. Men could not similarly plead 'seduction' or the trauma of unassisted childbirth in this context- as witnessed by the case of William Woodbridge, who committed incest with her niece that subsequently resulted in her pregnancy and childbirth, leading to the killing of the newborn and his subsequent execution for murder in 1877 .

Originally, concealment arose in seventeenth century Anglo-Scottish law and sought to punish secret illegitimate pregnancies and childbirth where mothers hid the bodies of the infants after birth or stillbirth. As noted above, not all mothers were successful in pleading concealment- the cases of Phoebe Veitch and Sarah Jane and Anna Flanagan stand out as exceptions to this general rule, although the defense was usually effective when it came to mitigated imprisonment or even acquittal, in some circumstances

Individual Cases

In the case of Mary Ann Spendlove, concealment was judged to have occurred and she was acquitted of murder in 1871, and subsequently sentenced to two years imprisonment on the lesser charge.

From Galway in Ireland, Bridget Gee (1845-?) was initially described as a "good industrious girl" while employed as a maidservant at Dunedin's Glasgow Hotel. However, in June 1871, she gave birth and then concealed the body of her newborn infant. Although she claimed that the death of the infant was accidental, the infant had suffered concussion to the head and lost blood through laceration. Although Gee was not found guilty of manslaughter or murder, she was found guilty of concealment.

Similarly, Margaret Collins (1854-?) had no family available in New Zealand to assist her covert pregnancy and childbirth, thus leading to her slashing her newborn baby's throat and hiding the body. However, she was found guilty of manslaughter, given the nature of her infant's fatal injuries.

In 1884, Auckland mother Rosina Smith initially fostered out her newborn infant, but then absconded with the two-month old baby, before burying him in a market garden in Parnell, an Auckland suburb.

Sometimes, however, the balance of evidence pointed otherwise. In 1881, Dunedin coroner Thomas Morland Hocken advised against keeping an infant in bed with its parents, as there could be problems with respiratory distress if the sleeping parents rolled over and inadvertantly suffocated the baby in question. However, in the case of Mary Ann Weston, there were grounds to suspect that the death of the infant may have been deliberate, as Dunedin's Industrial School orphanage had taken her two earlier children into custodial care, and Weston was drinking heavily.The coronial inquest jury found Weston had a manslaughter case to answer, but Weston was later acquitted of manslaughter in the Dunedin Supreme Court