When Babies Have Babies (and murder them)

The scenario is pure tragedy. Via UNC lawprof Tamar Birckhead, who spent a decade in the trenches as a public defender, the story of Cassidy Goodson offers nothing to warm one's heart.

According to a news release from the local sheriff’s office, on Sept. 19, 2012, Cassidy Goodson went into labor in the bathroom of her family’s mobile home in Lakeland, Florida.  To hide her cries of pain, she placed a towel in her mouth and ran the water in the faucet. She used a pair of scissors to pry the nine and a half pound baby out of her womb and into the toilet, where she squeezed its neck until it stopped moving. Then she cleaned up the bathroom, showered with the dead baby, and placed the infant’s body in a shoebox along with her soiled clothes and towels.

Three days later, after smelling a strong odor coming from Cassidy’s room, her mother found the deceased newborn and placed a frantic call to the police. Upon questioning by homicide detectives, Cassidy confessed to choking the baby to stop him from breathing because she “didn’t know what to do with it.” Autopsy results have confirmed that the cause of death was asphyxia from strangulation and blunt force trauma. The ninth-grader is now being held at the county juvenile detention facility and ultimately could be sentenced to life in prison.

Tamar's post raises questions about our inability to prevent this tragedy from occurring. Sure, "safe havens" have been created for mothers who shouldn't be, providing them with a better way of ridding themselves of a child than murder, but their efficacy for a 9th grader is dubious. Tragedy ensues, one way or another.

Of course, we’ve been down this road before. A teenage girl hides her pregnancy, gives birth in secret, and puts the infant in a trash bag or dumpster. The baby is discovered – sometimes alive, but more often than not, dead. The public responds with anger and disgust. The girl reports paralyzing fear and intense shame – for having sex, getting pregnant, not knowing what to do, and abandoning or smothering her own baby. The criminal justice system steps in, extracts a conviction, and imposes punishment – typically including a prison sentence.

Tamar searches for answers, which have been elusive for centuries.  We don't want this to happen. When it does, is anything solved by throwing away the child mother? 

Despite the questions, and considerations, raised in Tamar's post, it was picked up by the Huffington Post, and linked under it's Crime banner, where such stories are salaciously fed to the masses with the least amount of thought possible.  The interest isn't edification, but page views, and anything that works up the masses into a lather makes for good content.

The by-product of having been mentioned can be seen in the comments to Tamar's post.


So much for even the most minimal effort at thought. Fourteen-year-old Cassidy Goodson is "EVIL."  No need to deal with the problem, the tragedy of a baby murdered and a 9th grader who will be tried as an adult for it.  After all, since she's "EVIL," and our beloved children are wonderful, there is no problem to fix.  Evil people do evil things, and this has nothing to do with us, our children, our world.  Just rid society of these "EVIL" people and problem solved.

What readers here, and people who are otherwise slightly attuned to the horrible reality that bad things happen at the hand of human beings, often fail to appreciate is that there are others in our society, a great many others, who have a solution to these tragedies when people like Tamar (and me) don't.  Just get rid of them. Easy, right?

Did Cassidy Goodson wake up one morning with the purpose of someday choking a baby to death?  Was she otherwise a relatively ordinary young teen, with dreams of going to a prom, or being a volleyball player, or maybe attending college where she could learn to become a nurse? 

Did she make a mistake in having sex and getting pregnant at such a tender age?  You bet. It's a mistake made all too often, despite the plethora of efforts by the government, churches and parents to stop teen pregnancy.  Something about hormones and human nature seems to keep getting in the way of solving the problem.

But at the instant of giving birth, which she somehow concealed from her family and somehow felt was better concealed than seeking her mother's help, with different raging hormones flowing through her body, she made the most horrific choice possible. 

Let's be clear, what she did to her newborn baby was as horrible as could be.  The act of infanticide is evil.  But that doesn't make Cassidy Goodson evil.

To plumb the depths of what went wrong here would require far more words, and far greater understanding, than I possess.  To chalk it up to a facile attack of a child by calling her "EVIL" suggests that society has just given up on trying to solve our problems and resorted to the lowest, most ignorant, response.

While people like Tamar try to infuse terrible scenarios with some thought in the hope that we can do better to avoid both the horror of infanticide itself, and the horror of dumping the life of a 14-year-old into a hole until she dies, others like Huffington Post Crime cater to ignorance as long as it brings in advertising revenue.  Like it or not, their reach dwarfs the reach of blawgs like Tamar's. Or mine. Or any of the others who do their best not to make people stupider.

As the comments to Tamar's post shows, this is going to be a very hard battle to fight.  For most people, thinking makes their head hurt.


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