Last week, 19-year-old Paris Mayo was sentenced to at least 12 years in prison for the murder of her newborn baby when she was 15. After concealing her pregnancy, Mayo delivered her baby alone, silently, in her parents’ home in Ross-on-Wye while upstairs her father, who would die 10 days later, was undergoing dialysis, and her mother slept.
Mayo told police the baby “all of a sudden popped out” while she leaned against a windowsill downstairs. Terrified of being discovered, she crushed her baby’s head and stuffed his mouth with cotton wool balls before concealing his body in a bin bag, explaining: “I didn’t want anyone to throw him away, I just wanted someone to deal with it.”
These details are shocking – unfathomable. But the jury’s decision to reject a verdict of infanticide is also deeply troubling. Her murder conviction adds to an increasingly clear picture that women and girls who conceal a pregnancy and subsequently cause the death of their infant through violence or neglect are being treated with an ever more punitive approach.
Research by Dr Emma Milne, an associate professor in criminal law and criminal justice at Durham University, found that women who are accused of killing a newborn are incredibly vulnerable and experience pregnancy as a moment of crisis. Milne is concerned that the 1938 Infanticide Act, a homicide offence which provides such women with a partial defence for the murder or manslaughter of a biological child aged under a year, is being swept aside. For the last 50 years, no woman has been imprisoned following a conviction of infanticide, with many receiving psychiatric support.
There is, she told me, a perceived “hardening from the Crown Prosecution Service” towards such cases and a misunderstanding of the psychological state these women experience. They often live with violence and abuse, as Mayo did, and fear the discovery of their pregnancy. Isolated and terrified, they deny their condition, and deliver a baby without assistance or pain relief, viewing their infant as a “problem” that can only be solved by being “unborn”. During the labour, they may experience dissociation, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Mayo testified to a difficult family life: an “emotionally cruel” father who made her feel “patronised and belittled” and “worthless”, so she sought attention by having sex at age 13. Unable to confront the reality that she might be pregnant, she never took a pregnancy test, she claimed, and she “would try to make excuses to myself to what I thought was wrong”. In delivering his verdict, Mr Justice Garnham acknowledged her appalling situation but still sentenced this “rather pathetic (in the true sense of that word) 15-year-old girl” to custody for homicide.
In reading the details of Mayo’s case, I was also struck by what seems a new, harsher attitude towards what Milne terms “crisis pregnancy”, which is reflected in juries’ willingness to convict women for murder rather than infanticide. In 1995, a new mother myself, I interviewed Caroline Beale, a civil servant from Essex who had been arrested at John F Kennedy airport, New York, for the murder of her newborn daughter.
Although Beale was older than Mayo, in a stable job and a seemingly stable relationship, her emotions surrounding her pregnancy were so conflicted that she denied it to herself and her partner. In September 1994, when the couple were on holiday in Manhattan, she gave birth in their hotel bathroom while her boyfriend was out. Beale claimed her daughter was stillborn and would later describe that night as “like looking back at a photograph – I can hardly remember anything about it”.
When we met at Rikers Island jail a year later, whenever I touched too closely on the details about her pregnancy, she was unable to speak. She would serve eight months there on remand before her lawyer could arrange a plea bargain for a lesser charge of manslaughter in exchange for her return to the UK. Back home in March 1996, Beale was not imprisoned but placed on probation for five years and received outpatient psychiatric treatment at the Maudsley hospital in London.
The public empathy for women like Caroline Beale 30 years ago has regressed dramatically, with juries today increasingly rejecting the defence of infanticide in similar cases. Richard Griffith, a senior lecturer in nursing at Swansea University, found that in 59 cases of infanticide between 1980 and 1990, none resulted in a custodial sentence. According to Milne, where more recent guilty pleas of infanticide have been accepted, they have involved women suffering from post-natal depression or psychosis who kill an older infant. But in the past five years alone, Mayo joins three other women convicted of murder after trying to plead infanticide of a newborn.
Among them was Silipa Keresi, 38, who gave birth alone and abandoned her newborn in woodland near Hythe, near Southampton; a mother of four and married to a Commonwealth solider who had left the British army, her pregnancy coincided with her family losing their right to stay in the UK. In December 2021, Mr Justice Garnham sentenced her to life for murder. In June 2017, Rachel Tunstill was given a 20-year minimum term for stabbing her newborn to death after a concealed pregnancy, and in June 2021, Hannah Cobley was also jailed for life for murdering her daughter after a crisis pregnancy.
Milne points to the structural shifts that negatively affect the outcomes for these women, such as massive cuts to legal aid so that defence teams, with medical experts and criminal barristers, are paid from ever-shrinking budgets and have less time to prepare their defence. The lack of financial support for legal teams makes it much harder to present complex cases to a jury.
It goes without saying that these rare cases are unbelievably tragic for all concerned, but we should also keep in mind that they occur against the backdrop of services, from reproductive health to refuges for domestic violence, being severely reduced. Crisis pregnancies are bound to continue. We must be realistic about that; and we must not lose sight of the truth that the women involved also deserve our collective compassion.
Julie Wheelwright is a historian and author of Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium
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