The London borough of Westminster — a place associated with power and continuity — was the setting for a disturbing death in March. An 18‑day‑old girl, Mariam, died after falling from a third‑floor flat. Her mother has been charged with murder. The ordinary scene — a newborn, a central London apartment, the routines of early parenthood — collides with an allegation that jars against one of society’s deepest assumptions: that the maternal bond is elemental and unbreakable.
Asking why mothers kill their children is unsettling and feels almost taboo, as if the question itself risks normalizing the unconscionable. The comforting response is that such acts follow mental disturbance: breakdown, disorder, or psychological impairment that explains a rupture of attachment. In some cases that is relevant. But treating infanticide solely as exceptional disturbance preserves our belief in a universal maternal instinct without probing deeper.
Modern cases suggest the phenomenon is not a single anomaly but a recurring, if rare, pattern. Women who conceal pregnancies and kill newborns, mothers who give birth alone and act in panic, and parents whose substance dependence reshapes priorities are all part of a heterogeneous set of tragedies. Some acts are secretive and brief; others are prolonged and cruel. Some killings are calculated, others impulsive. They share one disquieting feature: an apparent absence, displacement, or collapse of the attachment that is expected to bind mother to child.
Infanticide appears not only in courtrooms but in myth and literature. Medea’s murder of her children remains powerful because it violates the widely held conviction that parental love is a basic human instinct. One response has been to treat such stories and cases as rare deviations that prove the rule of maternal love. But their persistence and variety suggest a more disturbing possibility: maternal attachment may be less an automatic, biologically fixed reflex than a capacity that develops through social conditions and care practices.
What feels natural is often the product of long and largely invisible processes of learning. Language, manners and moral responses are acquired through immersion, repetition and social reinforcement; attachments are no different. Human beings are not born knowing whom or how to love. Capacities for attachment develop through socialization — daily interactions with family, partners and institutions and the environments in which care is practised. Proximity, recognition and routine feed recognition and attachment; their absence can prevent a bond from forming.
There are many instances in which attachments persist despite serious strain. Parents may continue to care for a dependent child through cycles of relapse or illness. Yet in other situations attachment is displaced by more immediate pressures: addiction, extreme poverty, isolation, secrecy, or overwhelming psychological stress. Cases in which parents prioritize a substance, a relationship, or immediate survival over the child reveal that attachment is not simply feeling but also what takes precedence in a given moment.
If attachments are shaped rather than wholly innate, then the maternal bond depends on conditions that can be weakened or never established. The sociologist Travis Hirschi argued in Social Bond Theory that strong social ties restrain harmful behavior: people refrain from certain acts because they are bound emotionally and socially to others. If those ties weaken, restraints loosen. Applied cautiously, the insight is suggestive: attachment’s failure, however rare, becomes more intelligible when we see it as contingent on social bonds and supports.
Powerful prohibitions against killing children exist across cultures. The taboo’s force is moral as well as legal; it functions as a brake on behavior most people never contemplate. Yet norms are not absolute. As David Matza observed, individuals can “drift” in and out of alignment with moral frameworks. Under pressure, isolation or desperation, the constraints that normally guide behavior can fray. Acts that once seemed unimaginable may become, if only temporarily, possible.
The conditions that undermine attachment are diverse. Secrecy and stigma can leave mothers isolated at the moment of birth; lack of family or institutional support can remove the networks that scaffold early caregiving; poverty and homelessness can overwhelm practical capacities to care; substance dependence can reorder priorities; intimate violence, mental illness and chaotic domestic environments can interrupt processes of bonding and recognition. In some cases the breakdown is abrupt; in others it is gradual and cumulative. Each case has its own logic, but a common theme is the erosion of the social and material conditions that normally nurture attachment.
Seen this way, the rarity of maternal filicide does not confirm that maternal attachment is inviolable. It indicates that the social processes which form and sustain that attachment usually function. When they do not — because of secrecy, strain, dislocation, dependency, or isolation — the result, though thankfully uncommon, shifts from the incomprehensible toward the explicable. Understanding this does not excuse the act or dilute its moral gravity. Rather, it reframes the question: alongside asking why some mothers kill, we must ask how social structures, supports and stigmas contribute to the collapse of bonds that ordinarily protect children.
The prevailing belief in an instinctive, immutable maternal love is powerful and, in most lives, empirically supported. But acknowledging the social formation of attachment points to prevention: strengthening community supports, reducing stigma around pregnancy and motherhood, ensuring mental‑health and addiction services are accessible, and addressing poverty and violence that erode caregivers’ capacities. These are not immediate answers to every case — many will remain rooted in individual suffering and pathology — but they shift the focus toward reducing the conditions in which attachments fail.
Infanticide will likely always shock because it violates core moral expectations. Yet examining why it occurs — without conceding or normalizing the act — can illuminate the fragile edges of what we take to be natural. If the bonds that bind parents and children are partly forged by social conditions, then protecting children requires protecting and supporting the social contexts that make attachment possible.
