Infanticide in 19th-century New Zealand

Infanticide in 19th-century New Zealand was difficult to assess, especially for newborn indigenous Maori infants. Resultantly, many New Zealand women who might otherwise have been sentenced to penal servitude or capital punishment in New Zealand had their sentences commuted to the lesser charge of "concealment of birth" under the Offences Against the Person Act 1867. However, this relative leniency only extended to mothers of concealed or hidden infants who subsequently died. Fathers, grandparents and "baby farmers" like Minnie Dean, the only woman to be executed in New Zealand history and Daniel Cooper in the 1920s, were viewed as more culpable for the death of such infants.

In a recent volume on childbirth, pregnancy, infant mortality and infanticide in 19th-century New Zealand, Alison Clarke places the deaths of newborn infants in colonial era 19th-century New Zealand in historical context. Over the four decades (1861-1899) for which statistical evidence is available, an estimated cumulative 53,000 such infants perished in New Zealand. Early New Zealand colonial statistics show that from 1872, more than one thousand infants or small toddlers died each year from maladies and environmental factors summarized below, peaking at 1995 such fatalities in 1883, although in 1872 (1941 deaths), 1875 (1816 deaths), 1886 (1889 deaths), and 1899 (1806 deaths), more than one thousand eight hundred infants died.

If the afflicted child was less than one month old at their time of death, there may have been premature birth. Without the complex life support technology available in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this would often prove fatal due to the lack of sufficient infant respiratory development. Other than that, newborn infants might also perish from sharing beds with their parents, who might roll over and smother them inadvertently during sleep; negligent parental alcohol abuse and impaired standards of care; administration of alcohol to prevent infant cries; and the associated use of soporific drugs such as laudanum and chlorodyne. In the case of prostitutes and single pregnant women, sexually transmitted diseases might be passed on to their newborn infants during prenatal development, while inadequately warm clothing might affect mortality for the newborn infants of the poor. Infant malnutrition might occur due to lack of awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding for infants, as well as the absence of medical treatment for conditions such as bronchitis, pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, diarrhoea, enteritis, gastritis, ileus, inherited syphilis and tuberculosis.

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