The Insanities of Reproduction: Medico-legal Knowledge and the Development of Infanticide Law

Drawing on autopoiesis theory, Ward (1999) challenges the established view that the adoption of the English infanticide law in 1922 (amended 1938) is an example of the medicalization of law, insisting that the 1922 Act embodied a lay biological theory and that contemporary psychiatric theories of the ‘insanities of reproduction’ focused on socio-economic, rather than biological, stressors. Both the medicalization and autopoiesis interpretations of infanticide law are misplaced. A broader review of the medical literature discussed by Ward, and of a related anthropological literature he does not treat, reveals a more complex picture: while Ward’s critique of the medicalization thesis is broadly apposite, and an associated anthropological literature was also more socio-economic than bio-racist (Reekie, 1998), there was a bio-medical strand of thought, as well as an equally biological atavistic line of theory regarding infanticide, which ran alongside the socio-economic model. In addition, the expressed biologism of infanticide law, whatever its origins, can still be thought of as contributing to the medicalization of law subsequent to its passage and amendment, especially given the dominance of the bio-medical model in psychiatry since the 1960s.