Despite the media coverage, I haven’t paid much attention to the trial of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five kids, nor that of Marilyn Lemak, the Chicago nurse recently convicted of killing her three children. But now Dr. Donna Anderson, a Minnesota obstetrician, and Dr. Ellen Feinberg, an Illinois pediatrician — are both accused of stabbing their children to death.
I had no idea that mothers kill their kids as often as fathers in the US. That, according to this well-written piece in yesterday’s Slate, When Parents Kill: Why fathers do it. Why mothers do it. Our society tends to view the deeds differently:
We still view children as the mother’s property. Since destroying one’s own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else’s property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals, who go to jail or the electric chair…. Women still believe that they have sole dominion over so little property that arson and armed robbery and rape make no intuitive sense to them. But the destruction and control of something deemed to be a woman’s sole property sends a powerful message about who’s really in charge…
And although the author of the article doesn’t make the connection, I’d contend that that’s a relationship issue, not that different than the men who “kill their children to get back at a woman — to take away what she most cherishes.” Andrea Yates, I’d venture, was at some level mad at her controlling husband for leaving her at home all day with five unruly kids under the age of seven.