A 22-year-old leaves her baby in the toilet after giving birth in a WalMart.
There is no evidence, Krishan said, “that this is a woman who wanted to abandon a live baby. She thought she was leaving a fetus.”
Is that all? Well then. Guess we don’t need to worry.
by 
I grew up on a farm. Calving season was far and away the most dangerous time of year. Cows that were normally docile, calm animals would become raving flipping lunatics when they were perinatal or post-partum. Give them a few days and they would go back to being docile, calm animals.
“But we’re human beings!” you say. “We’re rational and don’t need to behave like animals.” I concur. 90% of the time. And yet… the hormones that control childbirth are incredibly powerful, and they sometimes make women act in unpredictable ways (like the animals we are). I don’t think that that any woman should ever be held responsible for how she behaves during labor or shortly thereafter, and I feel so horribly sorry that this woman went through the process alone.
I’ve been one of the women who has behaved very stupidly during the post-partum period. Correct me if I’m wrong, Andrea, but I don’t think you’ve had children. Please don’t be too quick to judge her.
He wasn’t breathing and she thought he was dead, so she panicked and ran instead of calling police… because we have the same hormones as cows?? I’m confused.
If she didn’t know she was pregnant, and she’s been indoctrinated to believe that a fetus is not a baby, then it isn’t difficult to imagine her disorientation. It’s been scientifically proven that “reality thinking” is not fully developed until a person is at least a quarter century old.
Kristina–
Of course she SHOULD have called the police, or tried to resuscitate the baby, or called for help, or done anything other than what she did. I don’t want to sound like I’m saying that what she did was in any way okay.
What I am saying is that she shouldn’t be held responsible. I don’t think it is fair to hold any woman responsible if she says or does anything bad when she is under the influence of childbirth hormones and pains.
There is a reason that, for eons, women have assisted one another in childbirth. That way there is someone there to clean up the baby and introduce it to its mother. Someone is there to make sure the bonding process starts to take place. After the ordeal that is childbirth. sometimes women are not able to start the bonding process by their own initiative.
I can’t help but think that, if I were to be overcome by incredible pain in a public washroom, once the pain had subsided a bit I would flush and hurry home without looking too closely at just what I had left behind in the toilet.
Cases of women abandoning their newborns come up quite regularly. There is always a huge outcry “How could she have so little respect for the baby?”
But I think back to the days on the farm, when newborn calves would quite regularly be abandoned by their (usually first-time) mother. And my dad would go haul up the calf and round up the mother, and put them in a pen together, and get the calf sucking, and, lo and behold, her mothering instincts would kick in and we would have a bonded cow-calf pair.
I get so sad for the mother in these cases, who didn’t get the support she needed to make it through pregnancy and birth. My stomach sinks with horror thinking about the grief and guilt she goes through when the reality of what she has done sinks in.