Medico-Legal History of Infanticide in South Africa, Late 19th to the Early 20th Century
Medico-Legal History of Infanticide in South Africa, Late 19th to the Early 20th Century
- Prinisha BadassyPrinisha BadassyDepartment of History, University of the Witwatersrand
Summary
By early 20th-century South Africa, discourses around the definition and designation of infanticide as a criminal act developed with three main foci: medical, moral, and legal. State and official concerns about this crime were part of a larger preoccupation with moral reform specifically related to sexual morality, legitimacy, good parenting, and racial purity. Within the medical and legal fraternities, debates at the time were fixated on nebulous understandings of illicit sex and illegitimacy. The narratives of these criminal cases pry open the social dynamics of private and intimate spaces where love, lust, incest, ignorance, poverty, seduction, and rape sometimes resulted in undesirable and “illegitimate” pregnancies. In the early years of the Union, state interventions (medical and legal) in this realm were crucial to the constitution of whiteness and the consolidation of racial boundaries. The codes of shame, honor, and good conduct that operated during this time reveal that assumptions about dangerous or bad parenting, bastardy, and miscegenation served as indices from which the state regulated and created malleable categories of respectability, further mythologized the concept of motherhood, and increasingly cast women as social causalities and inescapable victims of their biological make up. However, cases of infanticide as a deliberate act also reveal that for some women and men, this implied a life saved from economic ruin or material and moral poverty. Throughout the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, men and women who wished to terminate and conceal unpropitious pregnancies were not only responding to socioeconomic and religious pressures but more so to the lack of effective alternatives: reliable and accessible contraception or recourse to foster care and adoption. The layers of pathos, desperation, prejudices, and pity reflected in incidences of infanticide are not only illustrative of the socioeconomic and political context in which they are located, but this also reveals the deep emotional entanglements of love, affect, and emotional currencies that were constantly under state surveillance.
Keywords
Subjects
- Legal History
- Medical History
- Southern Africa
- Women’s History