Five drowned: A method in her madness

This is, I promise, the final version. Reposts are welcome! JB
=============
Andrea Yates executed her 5 children and there is a popular explanation for her actions and competing judgments about them: she was depressed and her killing her children was either "understandable" or "unspeakable." Mothers of most species will sometimes kill their own children. Humans through time have been no exception and I find her actions neither unspeakable nor unimaginable.

Andrea's behavior has a structure that appears consistent with what we believe about human evolutionary history. Her feelings happen to nearly every mother to some degree but those feelings are often inhibited or redirected by men and by social organizations. This reproductive contest between the sexes starts at conception and there is no surprise that the "understanding" commentary tends to be from women, either in print or on the radio talk stations at 2 am, whereas "unspeakable" and "unimaginable" come from men.

A case can even be made that psychiatric interventions that focus only on depression will obscure the vital foundations for her behavior --- after all, few depressed people roam and kill children. By attributing Andrea's conduct solely to depression, even psychiatry works in favor of husbands and children but against women. It also misdirects our guard for the next incident.

Girls want to be themselves

Genes and experience guarantee that no two humans are the same. Women both differ from each other and overlap the conduct of men. The following essay applies to the average careers of women and men rather than to the details of any one of them.

There should be no surprise that having children is not the first choice of many women and Andrea Yates is not the first to cast them off. First, there's usually a trade off in nature, having fewer children is associated with living longer. Second, the majority of women since the dawn of humankind have not left descendants: women and their infant often died in childbirth or their children later died from injury, malnutrition, and disease before attaining adulthood. However, in some modern communities where every baby is saved, up to 40% of women voluntarily have no descendants. Women's history and their contemporary preferences imply that there may be a long line of women who died while doing something that was not in their heart.

Women calculate their personal outcomes when they invest in a child or put one aside. They have fewer children in very bad or in very good economic times but more children in between these extremes. Drought, heat, cold, prolonged physical duress, and the absence of emotional and physical protection tip women towards failure of menses, more spontaneous or deliberate abortions, and abandonment of children.

On the other hand, partnerships with protective males, physical and emotional support from sisters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, and secure access to food, water, and shelter tip her towards "yes."

Finally, give her more social choices and economic freedom and she tips back towards "no."

Why mothers need self defense

Children are expensive from the moment of conception. According to David Haig, the placenta is an invading body, managed primarily by the father's genes, one that takes control of her blood sugar and her blood pressure and challenges her immune system. If she can resist placental demands, she will have a smaller child but remain healthier herself. If she cannot, then the baby is larger even if smarter, delivery risk is higher, the physiological cost to her is greater and her ability to have more children is often impaired.

After a child is born the nursing mother faces calcium loss, increased nutritional costs, social dependency, and lost opportunities for doing other things. She must negotiate with other mothers for how her child is judged and treated by them. The bottom line, according to anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, is that women place the quality of a child above quantity but men may do the opposite, sometimes using up several women instead of just one.

The extended social war between men and women

This fundamental biological conflict --- "make better" vs. "make more" --- emerges in our religions, medical treatment, and social customs and with fairly consistent results across time and societies. Hrdy devotes 3 chapters in her book, Mother Nature, to the methods that have been used in recent European history. They continue today.

Unwanted children in Europe were given to orphanages in secrecy, often to die in their first year from disease. Some 22% of all children baptized in Florence in 1640 had been abandoned earlier. Hrdy mentions 12 foundling homes in Tuscany. One accepted 15,000 babies in the 18 years after 1755, 67% of them died. (In Moscow 81% of foundlings died in 1764 and 99% in 1767.) These data were hardly secret to the 15,000 mothers who gave their child back to God. Residents in Brescia commented about their foundling home, "Here children are killed at public expense" (Hrdy, p. 304).

Wet nurses were popular in Europe in the 1850s. Wealthy women moved them in and gained momentary freedom but also became more likely to have another child immediately. In contrast, poor women in the cities placed their children with rural wet nurses, a tactic that allowed mother to work but often killed her child. Some rural mothers abandoned their own infant but wet nursed the child of a wealthier couple. Even in these days, a mother who suffocated her child was considered a criminal; if she skipped some feedings and the child died from dysentery, she was labeled as stupid. (Maybe stupid is sometimes the way to go?)

Contemporary American mothers have access to contraception, abortion, and adoption; they rely less on abandonment or infanticide in order to achieve the same degree of reproductive choice that women had in earlier days. Before abortion and contraception became widely available, children put into American orphanages were often deprived of emotional warmth. Children, however, need grooming, talk, and hugs in order to live and to develop social skills. Social isolation cripples social natures.

Contemporary methods are also similar to those of the past (day care!) but include using Disney tapes and Game Boy as electronic sitters. (In 1995 there were 21 million 6 year olds in America, 12 million of them were in day care. Some 45% of children less than a year old are in day care. Hrdy insightfully equates it with wet nursing.) With these newer options, we retain our child's health but less of his loyalty. He achieves developmental mileposts on time but we are surprised when he ignores us or becomes aggressive.

Unfortunately, abortion and contraception are denied to members of some religious groups. (Adoption is uncertain for older children and children of minorities. And according to David Rowe, many adoptees do not do very well.) First, there is little formal recognition that women vary tremendously in their physical and emotional resources: the universal human nature of women is to have children and to want them. Failure to do either is a weakness, a mark of inhumanity, an absence of faith, or a sinful expression of selfishness. Second, religion expresses paternal interests when it pressures all women, regardless of their personal stamina and resilience, to have children. When we limit contraception, abortion, or adoption, we should expect abandonment. Hrdy tells us that if we prevent abandonment, we can expect infanticide.

Depression as a means to an end

Our treatments for depression can obscure the functions that it serves.

- Mothers rigorously assess their children for health and social skills and rely on teachers (usually other females!) to continue both assessment and training. Andrea saw her children as not developing normally. Mothers become demoralized if their infant is malformed, persistently ill, emotionally difficult, or rejected by other women. Human mothers make endless trips to doctors, then grieve and curtail further investment even if their baby does not die. Most birds and mammals appear to make similar decisions.

- We have a divided mind, often one side verbal and the other silent. (In some cases of untreatable seizures, neurosurgeons cut the fibers that connect the left and right sides of a patient's brain. The seizures abate but two people are sometimes found in a single head.) Interview one side of the brain and learn that it wants to be an architect, the other side wants to race automobiles. One side pursues mom with a hatchet, the other side restrains it. Give directions to our right side (the non talking half) and then ask our left what the right is doing. Our left readily makes up explanations that have nothing to do with the actual instructions given to the right.

Thus, we can't always say all of what we think about a given matter. On one hand, our saying "yes" obscures the shifting persuasions in our mind and, on the other, we all make up stories to explain impulsive or erratic conduct. Andrea Yates asked her brother, "How long do you think the devil's been in me?" Our traditional culture afforded her no other reasonable explanation outside of religion.

- The possible role of antidepressants deserves attention. It could be that Yates's depression was a major clue that an important part of her did not want children. Treating her depression may have shut off her awareness of a complaint but did not address the original complaint. Antidepressants often lessen concerns about social disapproval while lifting our serotonin levels: our guilt takes a holiday. But, in very rare cases if part of us wants to kill someone, we are more apt to do so in a calm, methodical manner.

- Andrea's father died 3 months after the birth of her 5th child. On the one hand, he had severe Alzheimer's and she provided much of his care. His death might have simplified physical demands on her but it may also have broken her sense of stability from earlier memories of him. His death might also have shown her the relief that death can bring. Might she have wished for his death or perhaps found herself praying for it? (Yes, children kill parents and perhaps for the same reasons that parents kill children.)

- Houston was flooded before she drowned her children ... symbolic causation or coincidence? Environmental crises inhibit ovulation and trigger migration, can they also trigger abandoning children? If so, then the coming climatic changes imply rougher going for our children, especially those who are less than healthy, less than protected by relatives, and less than wanted by their mother or father.

- Finally, we each simplify or complicate our lives from moment to moment every time that we postpone, cancel or delegate an obligation and every time that we adopt a pet, take on a new job, run 2 loads of wash instead of 1, or have another child. There is no other decision that we make so often or so reliably; no other decision when blocked triggers such rage or manipulation, anxiety, apathy, or despondency.

Andrea had not 1 or 2 children but 5 of them, ages 6 months, 2, 3, 5, and 7 years, and since entering jail, she has been tested for pregnancy with a possible 6th one. Individual activity stabilizes when there is a partnership between 2 or 3 people. Stability becomes immobility when there are 4 or more equal participants with no social hierarchy to simplify decisions. Personal initiative and self interest become null. (Remember your last committee?) Form a hierarchy on the basis of age and kids form lines, helping to rear each other.

Yates was immobilized by the complications in her life. Immobility elicits resentment, panic, helplessness, and apathy in most of us. Rats routinely get ulcers when immobilized; wild animals chew off a paw to escape from a trap. Mothers sometimes develop panic attacks and irritability, rage, eating disorders, and social withdrawal; they also escape into television, e-mail, and alcohol. They may even fantasize about being thin, single, tanned, warm, and wealthy.

Although sadness and physical pain magnify each other, depression can simplify our life. Even if feeling guilty for our failure, we transfer our burdens onto other people, delay completion dates, become apathetic about former priorities, and emotionally leave town. (Andrea is said to have had 2 prior suicide attempts. In blocking her suicide, did we compel some part of her mind to consider infanticide? Consider also: in killing herself, she would have left her husband with 5 children. In killing the children, she works against his reproductive interests and also escapes in a manner that he cannot prevent.)

Who's next?

Most of us see a major chasm between the nature of humans and the nature of beasts. It will be tempting to label Andrea as "bipolar" or "psychotic" and neglect infanticide as part of our conflicted genetic heritage and fail to understand personal ambivalence as an outcome of fundamental genetic disputes within us. We will treat her depression because that's the cause that we see and that's what we know how to do, as if it were the reason for her conduct rather than a tool for meeting her biological interests. We dismiss the foundations for her partially spoken motives; we fail to appreciate their significance in other women. Take away her tool, she will find another one. (Suicides run in clusters and are not uniformly related to depression. A similar dissociation and timing may exist for infanticide and for media coverage about it.)

Research and theory imply that many women have similar feelings even under less demanding circumstances and usually with less extreme outcomes. If we don't like dead children, neglected children, or day care children, then protect and extend women's reproductive options, train women and men in parenting, and encourage relatives to help.

Certainly, fix Andrea if we can but in a way consistent with her own conflicted nature and not that of a marble ideal that the rest of us expect. Her biological resilience, her medication, her religion, her husband, the spacing of the children --- change any one of these events and all of her children of whatever number might be alive and fulfilling some portion of their nature. Sing "Amazing Grace"? Humbug, there is too much hidden cost for Andrea in this form of acceptance. Jail her to satisfy our moral indignation that she escaped responsibility? Or that she had children and we cannot? Also humbug.

Punish her? Certainly. One function of punishment is to discourage repetition and to encourage alternatives. Employ severe consequences without choices and we will find more children left in a dumpster or dead from mysterious causes. With more choices, women might tell us "no" with words rather than with avoidance or neglect. It is clear that Andrea will be charged. But she is part of a network: equity demands that we also charge her husband and her minister as fellow conspirators.

-----------------

* I am grateful to Sarah Hrdy for her book, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Sarah has a distinguished history for discovering order in subtle things. JB.

Replies:

There are no replies to this message.

| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |

Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.