My views on this case are formed solely from being the mother to teenage girls - I don’t pretend to understand the legal process - so I apologise in advance if some of my assumptions are wrong.
What she did was fundamentally wrong, beyond cruel, appalling, and truly abhorrent, but I don’t think you can judge the actions of a panicking and frightened fifteen year old, the same as one would say an adult of over 25 years. The brain isn’t fully formed until you are approximately 25 to 27 years old.
Can someone confirm whether was she treated legally as an adult in court? Or was she tried as a juvenile?
The fact that she opted to go through the extreme pain and fear of what was presumably a first labour alone rather than tell her parents shows she wasn’t being logical for a start. And why was she so afraid of telling her father? What was she scared of? Did they take that in to account? She was obviously a vulnerable teen.
And I thought there was a recognised psychological phenomenon whereby a pregnant woman, or girl
in this instance, denies the pregnancy to
themselves over and over until
in their mind it doesn’t exist. And then their mind is shocked by the very real confronting event of birth and they can’t reconcile the two.
I am sure there was a case like this back in the eighties when a deceased baby of a young British woman backpacker was found at an airport. I think that argument was employed in court then.
I can almost see how a scared, exhausted, 15 year old (14 years old throughout most of the pregnancy) who has denied pregnancy to themselves for months, rationalised the situation by saying “well if no one knows about it, it’s come out of me, it didn’t live long, it doesn’t matter” . I am not saying at all that what she did was right but that I can almost understand how she rationalised the denial of it all, especially if she thought of the pregnancy in her mind as something that had happened to her, that it was something unwanted that had invaded her body, rather than an active choice she was excited about.
I’ve done jury service twice and been impressed by the system each time so I take the pp’s point above about the judge and jury knowing details we don’t and respecting the system.
However, can anyone really know the inside of a teenage girl’s mind as to whether intention was there I mean? Are the thoughts and motivations of a teenage girl’s brain, especially a frightened one, always clear to herself?
Or was she judged so harshly (compared to the elderly man who murdered his wife during lockdown at least) on the basis that she could not still as a nineteen year old bring herself to admit guilt? If so I would still say that as a teenager you are by definition prone to covering up and defensiveness.
And is how “she appeared to others” even relevant? The very essence of being a teenage girl is appearing cool and impassive on the outside while masking extreme uncertainty and panic on the inside.
And there is what one might call a “misogynistic” bias here perhaps? I don’t know quite how to frame it but the fact that this extreme situation could never by definition happen to a teenage boy means surely that she is at a disadvantage from the start?
And why did it take so long to come to trial? Surely she would have been tried more sympathetically as a young teen than an older one?