Asking why a mother might kill her child feels taboo, as if the question itself risks excusing the awful. The instinctive response is to attribute such acts to psychiatric breakdown or acute pathology. In some cases this is relevant and important. But treating every instance of infanticide as an inexplicable aberration preserves the comforting belief in a universal maternal bond without examining how attachments actually form and fail.
Contemporary cases show that infanticide is not a single kind of event but a set of different tragedies. Some mothers conceal pregnancies and kill newborns in secret; others give birth alone and act in panic; in other instances substance dependence, homelessness or violent relationships reshape priorities and capacities. Some killings are sudden and impulsive; others are prolonged or premeditated. What they often share is not a single motive but a breakdown, absence or displacement of the bond we expect to exist between mother and child.
This problem is not new. Literature and myth record parental violence — Medea’s killings remain haunting because they rupture the conviction that parental love is elemental. Rather than dismissing such stories as mere exceptions, their persistence suggests another possibility: that attachment is not simply an inborn reflex but a capacity forged through social conditions and everyday practices of care.
What we call “natural” is frequently the product of long, invisible processes of learning and reinforcement. Language, manners and moral habits develop through immersion, repetition and social recognition; attachments work in similar ways. Human beings are not born with a fully formed knowledge of whom to love or how to respond; capacities for bonding are shaped by interactions with family, partners, institutions and the everyday environments where care occurs. Regular proximity, acknowledgement and routine caregiving help create recognition and attachment; their absence can prevent those bonds from forming.
Attachments often endure despite severe strain — many parents continue to care for children through illness, addiction or poverty. But attachments can also be displaced or eroded by more immediate pressures: addiction, extreme poverty, isolation, secrecy around pregnancy, intimate partner violence, and overwhelming psychological distress. When a parent prioritizes a substance, a relationship, or immediate survival, attachment may falter in practice even if it remains a held value in theory.
If attachment is socially produced as well as personal, then the maternal bond depends on conditions that can be weakened or never established. Sociological theories such as Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory suggest that strong social ties restrain harmful behavior; when those ties fray, informal restraints weaken. David Matza’s work on moral “drift” likewise shows how people can lapse in their alignment with societal norms under pressure. These frameworks help make sense of how acts that seem unimaginable become possible in specific circumstances — not to excuse them, but to understand the mechanisms that allow restraint to fail.
The specific conditions that undermine attachment are varied. Stigma and secrecy can isolate mothers at birth; absence of family or institutional supports removes scaffolding for early care; poverty and homelessness can make even basic caregiving practically unmanageable; substance dependence can reorder what a parent prioritizes; intimate abuse and chaotic domestic environments can interrupt bonding and recognition. Sometimes the collapse is abrupt; other times it accumulates slowly. Each case has its own internal logic, but a recurring theme is the erosion of the social and material contexts that normally nurture attachment.
Recognizing these dynamics does not diminish moral responsibility or lessen the horror of infanticide. Rather, it reframes the question: alongside asking why certain individuals commit such acts, we should also ask how social structures, stigma and resource deficits contribute to the collapse of bonds that typically protect children. The rarity of maternal filicide indicates that the social processes that generate attachment usually work; when they fail, the results can sometimes be tragic.
If attachments are partly constructed, prevention is partly social. Measures that strengthen community supports, reduce stigma around pregnancy and motherhood, expand access to mental‑health and addiction services, and address poverty and domestic violence reduce the circumstances in which bonds are most likely to break. These interventions will not explain every case — some will remain rooted in acute pathology or individual suffering — but they shift attention toward reducing the risk factors that erode caregiving capacity.
Infanticide will always shock because it violates core moral expectations. Examining why it occurs — without excusing it — can illuminate the fragile conditions that make the maternal bond possible. Protecting children therefore requires protecting and supporting the social contexts in which attachment is formed: families, communities, health services and social safety nets that make caregiving feasible and recognized.”}