ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter studies the potential nexus of convicted lesser crimes of infanticide to unawareness of pregnancy, mainly exemplified with cases from nineteenthcentury Finland.1 These categories of infanticide, the murder of an illegitimate neonate in or soon after a clandestine birth, are explored as phenomenon linked to a medical condition in which a pregnancy is revealed to the woman as a biological fact only with the birth of her baby.2 The study proceeds from the standpoint that a fatal unassisted delivery out of wedlock, or a “secret birth” in legal terminology, might have been connected with elements concerning the body as matter rather than the body as dependent on the mind. The concept used for such pregnancies in historical legal cases is cryptic pregnancy. This research is about truthing, not the legal truth or the evasive absolute truth. Body and mind, and nature and culture were so interconnected in infanticide that the ontology of the crime is difficult to ascertain. What can be captured are the narratives of lived experiences of cryptic pregnancy and the outcome of such experiences. Attention is focused not simply on the productivity of discourse, but also on the way the materiality of the body surfaces in the experiences of the afflicted women themselves and in the experiences of their witnesses (Lundquist, 2008: 136-137, 152-153; Young, 2005: 9, 36, 39). Contemporary medical texts and popular lay believes of pregnancies provide a background to the narratives of cryptic pregnancy experiences in the studied legal contexts.
