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Maternity and Morality in Puebla's Nineteenth-Century Infanticide Trials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2021

Nora E. Jaffary
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Abstract

The criminal trials of twenty-seven women processed for the crimes of abortion and infanticide in the state of Puebla, Mexico during the nineteenth century reveal both community and state perspectives about contemporary notions of gender, motherhood, and honor. This paper argues that while there was an increase in both denunciations and convictions for these crimes in the nineteenth century, women's peers acted as reluctant participants in their incrimination. Both local and higher court justices convicted women more frequently for abortion and infanticide than they had done in the colonial era, but nonetheless sentenced them with considerable leniency. Some of the explanation for their leniency lay in court officials' view that indigenous women, who constituted a considerable percentage of the defendants, were too “rustic” or “ignorant” to be held responsible for their actions. The cases also reveal, however, that courts and communities shared the view that any means–including committing violent crimes or hiding pregnancies–justified the ends of protecting plebeian women's reputation of sexual honor.

Type
Forum: Rethinking the Criminalization of Childbirth: Infanticide in Premodern Europe and the Modern Americas
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 299 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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Footnotes

She is grateful for the research assistance of Hugo Rueda Ramírez and for the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

References

1. Archivo Histórico Judicial de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico (hereafter AHJP), Penal, caja 634, exp. 19484.

2. AHJP, Penal, caja 634, exp. 19484, fol. 21v.

3. Del Carmen's sentence was typical for these cases, in which courts sentenced a majority of those convicted of infanticide to confinement for 4 years or less.

4. These are all the abortion and infanticide cases housed in the AHJP. Only one of the cases involved the charge of abortion; the rest were all for infanticide. The archives’ extant holdings do not go beyond 1872. Excluded from this discussion are those cases that I determined involved accidental miscarriages caused though violent acts against pregnant women.

5. My findings parallel Kathryn A. Sloan's discussion of the augmented discourse of plebeian women's sexual honor in the mid-nineteenth-century Oaxaca in Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

6. Linda Arnold, “Why Pablo Parra Wasn't Executed: Courts and the Death Penalty in Mexico, 1797–1929” (paper presented at “The Death Penalty and Mexico–US Relations: Historical Continuities, Present Dilemmas, An International Symposium,” University of Texas at Austin, April 14, 2004), 9. Ruggiero, Kristin, “Honor, Maternity and the Disciplining of Women: Infanticide in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 72 (1992): 353–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11. On Latin America, infanticide, and honor, see Ruggiero, “Honor, Maternity and the Disciplining of Women”; Shelton, Laura, “Bodies of Evidence: Honor, Prueba Plena, and Emerging Medical Discourses in Northern Mexico's Infanticide Trials in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” The Americas 74 (2017): 457–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Merchán, Jhoana Gregoria Prada, “Un crimen por honor: El infanticidio en Mérida (1811–1851),” Procesos históricos: revista de historia, arte y ciencias sociales 21 (2012): 108–48Google Scholar.

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13. Kohlaas, Jacobe, “Constructing Parenthood: Catholic Teaching 1880 to the Present,” Theological Studies 79 (2018): 615–16Google Scholar; and Fernanda Núñez B. “Imaginario médico y práctica jurídica en torno al aborto durante el ultimo tercio del siglo XIX,” in Curar, sanar y educar: enfermedad y sociedad en México: siglos XIX y XX, ed. Claudia Agostoni and Anne Staples (Mexico City: IIH-UNAM, 2008), 127–62.

14. Puebla adopted the Federal District's 1871 Penal Code in 1875. Antonio A. de Medina y Ormachecea, Código penal Mexicano: sus motivos, concordancias y leyes complementarias Tomo I (Mexico City: Imprenta del Gobierno en Palacio A Cargo de Sabás A. y Munguía, 1880), vi.

15. AHJP, Penal, caja 667, exp. 20629, fol. 1v.

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18. Court officials referred to this section of the partidas in several cases, including AHJP, Penal, caja 679, exp. 21078, fol. 2v; caja 721, exp. 22524, fol. 29v; caja 1014, exp. 37572, fol. 34v; and caja 1096, exp. 42162, fol. 21v.

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22. AHJP, Penal, caja 357, exp. 10659, fol. 10.

23. AHJP, Penal, caja 1215, exp. 48483, fol. 24.

24. Ibid., fol. 28v.

25. Ibid. The fiscal serving in Puebla's Supreme Court in Petra Sevilla's 1836 case, AHJP, Penal, caja 595, exp. 18169, fol. 50v characterized Sevilla as a “monster.” Maria Josefa Sosa's legal defender also used similar language, AHJP, Penal, caja 634, exp. 19484, fol. 40.

26. Escriche, Joaquin, Diccionario razonado de legislación y jurisprudencia (Paris: Librería de Rosa, Bouret y Compañía, 1852), 856–57Google Scholar.

27. Ibid., 857.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. AHJP, Penal, caja 1215, exp. 48483, fol. 21v.

31. Ibid., fol. 22.

32. Ibid., fols. 23, 33.

33. AHJP, Penal, caja 1496, exp. 62017, fol. 50.

34. AHJP, Penal, caja 357, exp. 10659, fol. 23.

35. Colección completa de las leyes, decretos y órdenes o acuerdos legislativos del estado de Puebla desde la primera época que la Nación adoptó el Sistema federal republicana hasta nuestros días Tomo 1 (Puebla: Tip. Moneda Portería de Santa Clara núm. 6, 1894), 17–18.

36. AHJP, Penal, caja 357, exp. 10659, fol. 28.

37. Lenience at least in comparison with the contemporary United States and England. Courts sentenced several enslaved women in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Virginia for infanticide; while in Ohio between 1806 and 1879, 29% of white women executed were so sentenced for the crime of infanticide. Baker, David V., Women and Capital Punishment in the United States: An Analytic History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2016), 100, 117Google Scholar. In England, although awarding the death penalty for infanticide waned after the mid-eighteenth century, judges continued occasionally to sentence mothers with capital punishment for the crime through the nineteenth century; Lambie, Ian, “Mothers Who Kill: The Crime of Infanticide,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 24 (2001): 73–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

38. This finding is similar to one that Victor Uribe-Uran discovered characterized justices’ attitudes toward indigenous men who committed uxorcide during the Colonial Era. See his “Innocent Infants or Abusive Patriarchs? Spousal Homicides, the Punishment of Indians and the Law in Colonial Mexico, 1740s–1820s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 793–828.

39. AHJP, Penal, caja 631, exp. 19361, fols., 38, 42v.

40. Ibid., fol. 48v.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 50. Espridion Gutiérrez, the third witness, provided much the same testimony.

43. AHJP, Penal, caja 634, exp. 19484, fols. 31v-34v.

44. AHJP, Penal, Caja 631, exp. 19361, fol. 10v.

45. Ibid, fol. 39.

46. Micucci, “Another Instance of That Fearful Crime,” 71, found that similar ambiguities of evidence meant that authorities and juries were reluctant to convict women of infanticide in antebellum New York City.

47. Juan María Rodríguez, La Guía Clínica de partos, cited in Fernanda Núñez B., “Imaginario médico,” 14.

48. AHJP, Penal, caja 434, exp. 12745, fol. 16.

49. AHJP, Penal, caja 1041, exp. 39046, fol. 26.

50. Ibid., 49v.

51. AHJP, Penal, caja1496, exp. 62017, fol. 3.

52. Ibid., fol.16.

53. Ibid., fol. 41.

54. José Ferrer Especjo y Cienfuegos, “Lecciones de obstetricia, dadas oralmente para curso de segundo año,” Wellcome Library, WMS Amer. 122, fol. 15v.

55. Ibid., fol. 18v.

56. Francisco de S. Menocal, Estudio sobre el aborto en México: tesis para el concurso á la plaza de adjunto á la cátedra de clínica de obstetricia de la Escuela de Medicina de México (Mexico City: Imprenta de José M. Lara, 1869), 2.

57. Ibid., 3.

58. In addition to Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación, the archives consulted include the records of the municipal archives of both Mexico and Oaxaca City, the Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca (hereafter AHJO), the state archives of Yucatán, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Tlaxcala, and the AHJP. Several other cases of alleged abortion during the Colonial Era are discussed in Jaffary, Nora E., Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but they are mentioned in inquisitorial investigations for other crimes rather than involving criminal prosecutions for the crime of abortion.

59. See Jaffary, Nora E., “Reconceiving Motherhood: Infanticide and Abortion in Colonial Mexico,” Journal of Family History 37 (2012): 3–22CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

60. Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents, Table 4, 107.

61. See Ramos, Frances L., Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), 66–90Google Scholar.

62. AHJP, Penal, caja 1014, exp. 37572, fol. 34v.

63. AHJP, Penal, caja 434, exp. 12745, fol. 64.

64. AHJP, Penal, caja 721, exp. 22524, fol. 10v; the state Supreme Court also referred to this section in of the Partidas in AHJP, Penal, caja 876, exp. 29752, fol. 27.

65. AHJP, Penal, caja 1240, exp. 49923.

66. Their profile was thus consistent with those women convicted of infanticide later in the nineteenth century in Sonora whom Shelton studied, “Bodies of Evidence,” 469.

67. AHJP, Penal, caja 595, exp. 18168, fol. 4.

68. AHJP, Penal, caja 1496, exp. 62017, fol. 24.

69. AHJP, Penal, caja 434, exp. 12745.

70. AHJP, Penal, caja 357, exp. 10659, fol. 2.

71. AHJP, Penal, caja 1014, exp. 37572, fol. 22.

72. AHJP, Penal, caja 1496, exp. 62017, fol. 3v.

73. For further discussion of community scrutiny of daily life in this period, see Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74. AHJP, Penal, caja 667, exp. 20629, fol. 23.

75. AHJP, Penal, caja 595, exp. 18168, fol. 15.

76. Ibid.

77. AHJP, Penal, caja 631, exp. 19361, fol. 9.

78. AHJP, Penal, caja 1014, exp. 37572, fol. 10v. Family members also denied knowledge of women's pregnancies in several other cases: AHJP, Penal, caja 1041, exp. 39046, fols. 12v, 16; caja 1473, exp. 57143.1, fols. 10v-11, 15; and caja 631, exp. 19361, fol. 8v.

79. AHJP, Penal, caja 795, exp. 25817, fol. 17.

80. AHJP, Penal, caja 434, exp. 12745, fol. 1.

81. AHJP, Penal, caja 595, exp. 18168, fol. 6.

82. AHJP, Penal, caja 721, exp. 22524, fol. 2; caja 1096, exp. 42162; caja 1215, exp. 48483, fols. 2-4v. Juana Rivas's 1865 trial was initiated by a police constable, but he had been informed of the newborn's death by one of her neighbors. AHJP, Penal, caja 1240, exp. 49923, fol. 3.

83. AHJP, Penal, caja 434, exp. 12745, fol. 10v.

84. Ignacio Segura, Avisos saludables a las parteras para el cumplimiento de su obligación. Sacados de la “Embriología Sacra” del Sr. Dr. D. Francisco Manuel Cangiamila, y puestos en castellano por Dr. D. Ignacio Segura, Médico de esta corte (Mexico City: F. de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1775), 4.

85. AHJP, Penal, caja 1014, exp. 37572, fol. 6.

86. AHJP, Penal, caja 634, exp. 19484, fol. 10.

87. AHJP, Penal, caja 434, exp. 12745, fol. 54v.

88. Lamas, Marta and Bissell, Sharon, “Abortion and Politics in Mexico: ‘Context is All,’” Reproductive Health Matters 8 (2000): 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.