LIBERTY Health-care professionals learn why mothers kill their children

About 3 percent of American homicides involve babies.
By WILLIAM K. ALCORN
VINDICATOR HEALTH WRITER
LIBERTY -- Their emotions ranged from compassion, sadness and sympathy to disgust.
But, the dominant feeling among health-care professionals after seeing videos of women talking about killing their babies was anger.
Especially when Dr. Phillip J. Resnick revealed one of the women had given birth to another baby 21 months later, strangled that child too and was never caught.
Dr. Resnick, an internationally known forensic psychiatrist, spoke Monday at a workshop on "Post-Partum Psychiatric Disorders and Infanticide: From Blues to Breakdown."
He presented videos of women who killed their children to demonstrate their thinking before, during and after the slayings.
The morning speaker was Dr. Resnick's daughter, Kimberly Resnick Anderson, a psychiatric social worker and founder of Clinical Concepts in Sexual Health in Liberty.
About 3 percent of all American homicides are children killed by their parents, said Dr. Resnick, director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
There are two types of filicide: Operationally, filicide is the killing of a son or daughter older than 24 hours.
Neonaticide, a word Dr. Resnick coined, is the killing of a newborn under 24 hours of age. Neonaticide differs from filicide in the diagnoses, motives and disposition of the murder, he said.
What studies show
In his studies, he has found that among 16 to-18-year-old victims, fathers committed 80 percent of the homicides, but mothers are almost always the ones who commit filicide during the first week of a child's life.
The most dangerous period for the victims is the first six months of life, the time when mothers experience post-partum psychoses and depressions.
Eighty percent of women experience some emotional difficulty after a birth, ranging from the "baby blues," which is normally fleeting and doesn't require treatment, to about 15 percent who have severe post-partum depression, which, at its worst, has resulted in child murder, Resnick Anderson said.
Dr. Resnick said the majority of neonaticides are committed because the child is not wanted because of the stigma of pregnancy out of wedlock.
It is especially common among teenagers who are overwhelmed by dealing with their pregnancy and fear the reaction of their parents.
Most common reason
Dr. Resnick said the most common reason for neonaticide among married women is extramarital paternity.
Generally, the methods of neonaticide, listed in order of frequency, are suffocation, strangulation, head injury, drowning, exposure and stabbing.