Teenager guilty of murder.

[placemats]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/23/teenager-guilty-baby-herefordshire-hide-pregnancy-paris-mayo

Apart from the fact that she was raped, if consent to sex is to be a legal term, I find the prosecutions allegations appalling.

'But the prosecution alleged Mayo must have known she was pregnant but chose to deliberately conceal it because she was always planning to kill the baby.'

Perhaps Mayo didn't get early abortion help she needed. I know of one woman, who had 3 previous children, who didn't realise she was pregnant, thought it was early menopause until 4 weeks before her due date. However to allege she was always planning to kill the baby is a step too far. It intimates that those in authority know this child's mind.

You clearly have no idea about postpartum psychosis. Every single person who came into contact with her would be completely aware she was very mentally unwell. There would be no normal behaviour. The last women I met suffering with postpartum psychosis was sticking banana skin to her bedroom wall whilst chanting.

According to this US study on a sample size of 23.5 million women:
“The prevalence of psychosis at delivery was 698.76 per 100,000 hospitalizations.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29720114/

I did not know about that. Thanks.

Thats a very stereotypical view on psychosis- and quite inaccurate.

I know as I suffer from psychosis myself. I actually suffered from it from months and kept working, no one knew.

Read the blog post of the woman who had it while pregnant- no one knew she had it until she went for help and disclosed what she was seeing.

Quite inaccurate? I'm a midwife. I described quite literally the last patient I saw in her home with psychosis.

My obstetrician husband agrees it isn't inaccurate. 🙄

Here I will do this for you as a favour. She wrote
”My experience began with mild hallucinations, such as seeing flies buzzing around the room, and mild anxiety. This quickly progressed into much worse episodes - I had an episode where I was in the car with my Mum (she was driving), and I could see people throwing themselves in front of the car. When I looked at my Mum, her face was totally distorted. She didn't look like herself at all, it really was terrifying.”

HER OWN MUM DID NOT NOTICE HER DAUGHTER WAS HAVING A PSYCHOTIC EPISODE SITTING NEXT TO HER IN THE CAR

(and yet you expect Mayo’s neglectful mum to have noticed if she were psychotic from a different room in the same house while not seeing, hearing or speaking to Mayo at any time during her labour, birth, or when she committed infanticide for two hours, or for how ever many hours it was after that until the morning after)

Back to the blog post. When did anyone notice she had psychosis? After she got the courage to ask for help.

”I was reluctant to speak to anybody about what I was going through - I was scared and unsure about what would happen. I felt guilty that I was having these episodes, and spent hours searching the internet for stories of women who had had similar experiences. Eventually, I convinced myself I had to speak out - I knew if I left it, the episodes I was having could spiral out of control.”

What you’ve seen isn’t the usual pattern, it’s the more extreme outliers.

I’m not denying what you saw in your last patient, I am merely pointing out that your last patient is not representative of all psychosis in all women. That your extrapolation of her to all women is inaccurate.

Here is another account, again the psychosis starts long before the woman either asks for help or it gets out of control and someone notices. But my point is that the psychosis is still there, even when no one else notices and the sufferer is hiding it.

”Mother-of-two Charlotte Harding, from Cardiff, started experiencing frightening hallucinations and paranoia straight after the birth of her first son five-years-ago.
Charlotte, who was diagnosed with bipolar aged 20, said: "I didn't want to say anything, because I thought, they're monitoring me at the moment, and if I said anything, they would just take my child away."
When she got home the symptoms got worse, and she was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, a serious mental health condition which affects about one in 1,000 new mums.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-40594727

Charlotte acted normal enough to be discharged home with her baby….despite suffering from psychosis.

This is from the article posted on page 8 by Agnes about the charge of infanticide.
(My bold.)

In this context, it could perhaps be argued it is only women such as Brenda Hale who should be able to receive leniency for their crimes. That is, only the women with clear mental health conditions that caused them to kill who should escape the mandatory life sentence that comes with a murder conviction today. In which case, the Infanticide Act would be redundant as women such as Hale could rely on diminished responsibility.

However, to interpret the Infanticide Act and the context that surrounds infant killings by mothers so narrowly, misses the broader difficulties that surround these cases and the lives of accused women.

Research into the nature of newborn child killing that I have conducted, published in Criminal Justice Responses to Maternal Filicide: Judging the Failed Mother, reveals that accused women are incredibly vulnerable and that their pregnancy causes them a crisis. These are women living within the context of violence and abuse, in poverty, and in fear of their pregnancy being discovered by others. This fear and panic leads them to conceal/deny their pregnancy to themselves and those around them. The consequence is that they give birth alone and the panic and shock of the labour following the concealment/denial of the pregnancy results in a dissociative state. Women have reported floating outside of their body and watching themselves as they harm their newborn child. For women who kill older infants, the stresses and hardships that come with mothering a baby, often unsupported by family – lack of sleep, an incessantly screaming child, the difficulties and exhaustion that come with breastfeeding – can be seen to cause women to snap, resulting in her acting to harm the baby; action she almost certainly regrets instantly.

In cases such as these, the experience of the women, the context of the killings, and the nature of the mental capacity at the time of the killing does not always easily allow for the application of diminished responsibility. The benefit of infanticide is that, if interpreted in its broader meaning, ‘the balance of her mind was disturbed’ can capture the situations outlined above.
Whereas, the requirement for an abnormality of mental functioning that arises from a recognised medical condition needed for diminished responsibility may not be so easily proven.
https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/100-years-of-the-infanticide-act

Thank you @ScrollingLeaves
The jury didn’t do their job imho. This should be appealed and be a verdict of infanticide and the sentencing should reflect that she was a young 15yr old- a minor. A minor who is not even old enough to be having sex because teens that young are at high risk of mental (including psychosis) and physical complications from the stresses of pregnancy.

So you would have given a life sentence to two 11 year olds. Thank you for answering my question.

I think women's bodies and how they react or fail to react is severly, poorly understood and there's a willingness to disbelieve anything outside one's idea of norm.
She's responsible of course but she should not be judge as if she had a full set of actionable options in front of her. And this can never be compared to anything a boy would ever go through. The physiological burden is hugely significant and should not be dismissed just because it looks like a slight difference to the male body. It's not a slight difference. It is huge.

I find it sad that so many women are so sure this could never happen to them or their child.
If you are a loving and attentive mother, not distracted by a different emergency situation, you probably will know your dd is pregnant and help her.

Not always. Many many loving attentive mothers miss their dds ill health. Many mothers miss that their DDs are self harming or have developed eating disorders.

Maybe she was hoping she could hang on until her dad was dead. She won't have really known how far along she was, unless she was already tracking her periods which sounds unlikely.

So all the "post partum psychosis" excuses don't actually wash do they.

Having known people with psychosis I find it hard to picture a 15 year old successfully managing to hide psychosis for what weeks? months?

Here is another account, again the psychosis starts long before the woman either asks for help or it gets out of control and someone notices In this case we are talking about someone who would have been so ill that she stamped on a baby's head and then suffocated it. It wasn't the mild start of something that hadn't got out of control, did she go from zero to 100 mph in minutes/hours?

How can you know the jury didn’t do their job? They heard the evidence - you did not. They deliberated for 8 hours over it for gods sake! I really do despair in these discussions about trials, when people get a verdict they don’t like and they react with allegations of poor conduct by jurors or judges or barristers rather than consider for even one moment that their knee jerk view might be wrong …

I said that the jury didn’t do their job in my humble opinion. There’s a lot more to why I have this opinion than merely disliking the verdict.

Obviously, I do not know for a fact if the jury got it wrong, but the implication from you that juries are infallible and our justice system never gets it wrong is what gives me despair.

I’m not sure what you are asking here? Psychosis can start and carry on for months with no one noticing and the person hiding it from everyone. Untreated it then can escalate to a crisis often due to a psychosocial stress event. Childbirth is known to be a trigger for a psychotic crisis. Especially a traumatic childbirth, as happened with Mayo.

If she had been suffering psychosis while pregnant, then the fact that she was alone, gave birth unassisted without anyone in the house even noticing - how are they going to notice she’s in a full blown psychotic crisis when they are off ignoring her in another part of the house?

If she had not been alone, it would have been noticed and she would have been prevented from harming her baby. But she was entirely alone.

I don’t find it hard to consider at all. There are tons of threads on member only mental health forums written by people like me who suffer from psychosis and have psychotic episodes.

Depending on what is happening, you can mask it, you can hide it, you can pretend it’s not happening. Especially if your psychosis is of the ‘Im being watched constantly so I have to act normal because otherwise they will know I know I’m being watched’

here are some sample posts from a public forum of what it is like to live with psychosis
https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychosis/comments/10dvucd/can_a_person_be_experiencing_psychosis_and_appear/

It’s not unusual for teens to hide their psychosis either
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45548755

At 14 she hid a pregnancy because she knew there'd be no support for her, just blame and rage from a dad who already told her she was no daughter of his.
She had every reason to think she'd be kicked out.
Family in crisis.
Why would she have sought help with any other weirdness she may have experienced? How would she know what was normal and what wasnt?

I mean I'm not convinced she did have psychosis, but it's certainly not possible to assume she didn't.

And we know she was traumatised by what she went through.

I found pregnancy with my first traumatic, despite it being a planned and longer for pregnancy.
I found the birth of my second traumatic, with assistance, without unusual or specific reasons.

At 15, I'd have found the way my body was getting on with stuff without my control really distressing.

I had antenatal depression with both pregnancies, which wasn't diagnosed at the time.
At the age of 30, I could have terminated my second longed for pregnancy because I felt so low I wasn't sure how I could endure it.

I'm appalled at that baby's fate. I'm equally appalled at the lack of empathy shown to a 15yr old who'd experienced real trauma with no support.
Abusive father, terminally ill father, absent mother, pregnancy hormones, birth, none of which she was prepared for or had any support with.

I'm amazed at people downplaying the impact of hormones in pregnancy and birth.
Animals who are distressed during birthing eat or abandon their young.

None of the above means that I don't care about the baby. I feel that we as a wider society are culpable for failing the 14yr old that got pregnant and had no one to notice or tell.

The point was a woman who was well enough to be discharged from hospital, hurt no one and later became so ill that she needed treatment was being used to "explain" the teenager going from appearing normal to being so ill she murdered her baby. Two completely different scenarios and one does not explain the other.

It would be different if a case was quoted of a woman appearing normal and immediately on delivery her baby being rescued as she attempted to kill it. That would illustrate that being a possibility, the Charlotte case does not illustrate that.

People did notice and she lied. She said she didn't know she was pregnant but told a boy she thought might be the father that she thought she was. Regardless of all that with the benefit of hindsight, with presumably legal advice, with having received medical treatment she has not claimed it was infanticide, she did not plead guilty to infanticide. She took her chances with a jury and she lost.

Of course she lied. She was 15 and pregnant. Most likely not wanting to believe that this was actually happening. We all know what this feels like!

What were her reasons for not seeking abortion?