Overview

On April 22, 2015, the sorority sisters at Ohio's Muskingum University's Delta house encountered a horrific scene: pools of blood and gore in the first-floor bathroom. No one knew exactly what had happened, but the sisters suspected it had something to do with Emile Weaver. Studious, athletic, and well-liked, Emile had recently started wearing bulky sweatsuits and hiding her midsection, as if she was covering up a sudden weight gain. Could Emile be pregnant?   Emboldened by fear, the sorority sisters investigated. In the driveway next to the kitchen door, they found Emile's newborn baby girl dead inside a garbage bag. Emile's crime seemed senseless and left her family and friends with an aching question: what happened?   American Infanticide situates Emile's tragic act in a long intellectual, social, and legal history, uncovering disturbing missing chapters in our national history that undercut myths that have shaped public reactions to so-called monster moms and dumpster babies since the colonial era. Ultimately, the book uncovers how bias and inconsistency dictate how women accused of infant homicide are perceived and punished and sheds new light on how and why our legal responses to infanticide are so deeply misguided.

Full Product Details

9781978833821

Table of Contents

Reviews

""This book challenges readers to take a hard look at a subject that most would rather ignore and asks us to reconsider everything we think we know about who commits infanticide, why it happens, and how society responds to it with sympathy or malice."" -- ""The Book of the Dead, Podcast"" ""American Infanticide is an outstanding book that provides detailed insights into the injustices that surround neonaticide cases in the United States. Lewis's in-depth look at the experience of Emile Weaver provides a rich assessment of the narratives constructed around such cases and the ways that women are scapegoated to preserve social narratives about motherhood. Lewis illustrates that unless society, the law, and the criminal justice system take active steps to assist vulnerable women who experience their pregnancies as a crisis, women will continue to labor alone, resulting in newborn babies dying and unjust convictions and punishment of women in desperate need of compassion and support.""--Emma Milne ""author of Criminal Justice Responses to Maternal Filicide: Judging the Failed Mother"" ""American Infanticide is poised to become a classic, making an immediate and profound contribution to the scholarly literature on maternal filicide, while also offering itself up as a vitally important teaching tool for college students, defense lawyers, and even policy makers. There's nothing quite like it in the field--it combines a rigorous, fascinating summary of history with a critical engagement with existing scholarship, then offers an unprecedented close study of a single case."" --Michelle Oberman ""author of Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma""

""American Infanticide is an outstanding book that provides detailed insights into the injustices that surround neonaticide cases in the United States. Lewis's in-depth look at the experience of Emile Weaver provides a rich assessment of the narratives constructed around such cases and the ways that women are scapegoated to preserve social narratives about motherhood. Lewis illustrates that unless society, the law, and the criminal justice system take active steps to assist vulnerable women who experience their pregnancies as a crisis, women will continue to labor alone, resulting in newborn babies dying and unjust convictions and punishment of women in desperate need of compassion and support.""--Emma Milne ""author of Criminal Justice Responses to Maternal Filicide: Judging the Failed Mother"" ""American Infanticide is poised to become a classic, making an immediate and profound contribution to the scholarly literature on maternal filicide, while also offering itself up as a vitally important teaching tool for college students, defense lawyers, and even policy makers. There's nothing quite like it in the field--it combines a rigorous, fascinating summary of history with a critical engagement with existing scholarship, then offers an unprecedented close study of a single case."" --Michelle Oberman ""author of Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma""

Author Information

CLARA S. LEWIS is a senior lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is the author of Tough on Hate?: The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes, also published by Rutgers University Press.

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