Infanticide expert puzzled to see Winnipeg mother charged with manslaughter in newborn's death

An expert on mothers who kill their newborns says she was dismayed to see a Winnipeg woman charged with manslaughter this week in the death of her infant daughter.

Kirsten Kramar, a sociology instructor at the University of Calgary, said the charges laid against Jeanene Rosa Moar fit into a puzzling pattern of how Canadian prosecutors approach the rare crime of infanticide.

Moar was charged with manslaughter after police said the body of her newborn daughter was discovered in a Winnipeg garbage bin last month. She was also charged with concealing the body of a child.

Kramar said her frustration stems from the fact that in Canada, there's another charge meant to specifically address those kinds of situations: infanticide.

The Criminal Code defines the offence as a wilful act or omission by a mother that causes the death of her newborn, if at the time she "is not fully recovered from the effects of giving birth … or of the effect of lactation."

While a manslaughter conviction can carry up to a life sentence in prison, the maximum punishment for infanticide is five years, Kramar said.

"We need to be thinking about solutions other than prosecution and incarceration, particularly for women like this," said Kramar, who wrote the book Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies: Infanticide in Canada.

"They think that if they use the harsher punishment framework, that they're somehow going to be deterring other women from committing these kinds of crimes."

But that shows a lack of understanding about the conditions that lead to the exceedingly rare crime of infanticide, she said.

Mothers convicted of killing their newborns often had little or no support during their pregnancies, said Katreena Scott, academic director for the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children at Western University.

Similar cases also often involve domestic violence or mental illness, Scott said.

Moar, whose arrest was announced Wednesday, has struggled with addictions, homelessness and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a court was told during a 2018 sentencing hearing for the now 31-year-old.

Court also heard she had a "fairly good" though transient upbringing, until her mother's boyfriend kicked her out of their house when she was 18. That same boyfriend had also been "emotionally and/or sexually harassing" her, court heard.

Solutions that can address the root causes of infanticide depend on the circumstances in each case, Kramar said. They can include things like making sure women have appropriate supports throughout their pregnancy, and access to birth control and abortion.