A young American woman, traveling through Europe, is in custody after allegedly throwing her newborn out a Paris hotel window. The baby, pronounced dead at the hospital, is being investigated as a homicide.
A young American woman, traveling through Europe, is in custody after allegedly throwing her newborn out a Paris hotel window. The baby, pronounced dead at the hospital, is being investigated as a homicide.
Yep.
People always act shocked when shit like this happens, but it’s hardwired incredibly deeply.
100s of millions of years of evolution where if you didn’t have the resources to raise a child, or just an inordinate amount of stress…
It was better for yourself and your future offspring to not invest anymore resources in the kid.
Like, I’m a dude, I’ll literally never experience it. But I can still understand why it happens, and that’s the first step to understanding how to prevent.
The easiest thing in the world should be turning in an unwanted child, I’d even go as far as to advocate for the parents to have a route to regain custody within so many days. It certainly wouldn’t be ideal, but some people just need a fucking break to get their mind right and then they’d be decent parents.
But it’s easier to label people evil. And say only an evil person would do this.
It makes us feel better because then we “know” there’s nothing we could have done and it won’t happen to us.
But that’s just not true
This goes even beyond that:
Reading between the lines here, the baby was newborn, as in just born in that hotel room.
Animals abandon offspring kind of all the time. Human beings are an outlier, in that we don’t do that very often anymore, but it definitely does still happen. I think this situation is a bit different, though.
It would make sense; she denied it to herself until she physically couldn’t anymore, then panicked not knowing what to do with/about it and chucked the newborn.
Given she’s American; accepting you’re pregnant at 15 knowing you’ll probably be forced to keep it (or at least birth it)… That’s tough.
I’d expect more of this unfortunately; given Americas renewed fight against abortion, contraception, and sex related health information in general.
Just to clarify, it’s the baby that was “a minor under 15” for the definition of the crime. The woman is young, but I think if she were only 15 they’d have said so, maybe called her a girl. Even in France.
If anything, women should have the resources to take care of their kids. I understand that postpartum psychosis and depression is a real issue that sometimes has no easy solution, but this woman killed her child. I’m not saying this woman is evil but she still did something evil. I remember reading a story a few weeks back about a woman that shot her three kids in the head while they were sleeping because of postpartum psychosis. She may not have been evil, but murdering all of your children is evil.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I see some people (not necessarily you, just some people) talk about it as an excuse for their actions instead of it just being the reason. And that’s how we need to treat it because these women should be able to get the help they need so this doesn’t happen. It’s not like we haven’t known about it for years.