Eva and her Baby (A Story of Adolescent Sex, Pregnancy, Longing, Love, Loneliness and Death)

Abstract:     
This article is written in the form of a creative non-fiction essay in which I tell the story of Eva, a girl who was convicted of manslaughter in connection with the death of her newborn child. I undertook this mode of story-telling after years of writing in more conventional modes about maternal filicide in general, and neonaticide in particular. (Most recently, I co-authored a book entitled When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison (NYU Press, 2008)). The conventions governing standard law review writing and the relatively distant observer's voice I adopted in my earlier writings left me feeling as though I had failed to communicate an important part of the factors underlying neonaticide. This essay, in which I fuse Eva's story with my own, undertakes to tell a fuller truth about the complex factors that underlie this crime. The essay is part of a series of creative endeavors (essays and articles) in which I adopt an ethnographic or quasi-ethnographic approach to considering the nexus of criminal law and women's lives.

Accepted Paper Series