Infanticide

A judge today found an obstetrician guilty of infanticide on grounds that a fetus taken during an abortion on a 13-year-old was alive instead of stillborn as the doctor claimed. Dr. Joseph Melnick, 66, originally was accused of murder, but that charge was dismissed and replaced with the infanticide charge allowed under the state's abortion law. The doctor could be sentenced to a prison term of 3 1/2 to 7 years. Melnick's attorney, Richard Sprague, said immediately after the verdict that he will appeal the case "all the way until we get a vindication."

The woman whose baby died Wednesday after s he threw him from a four-story parking garage was depressed and "didn't know what she was doing," her husband has said. According to mental health experts, the period after pregnancy produces the highest lifetime risk of mental illness in women. Sonia Hermosillo has been charged with murder, accused of throwing her 7-month-old son, Noe Medina Jr., from a parking structure in Orange on Monday. The child died of his injuries Wednesday at UC Irvine Medical Center.

Farai Gatsi, 19 years old and deeply in trouble, pressed the worn toes of her black shoes together and tapped them nervously at her murder trial. The law weighed heavily on her thin shoulders, hunched forward beneath a plain white cardigan, facing the red robes and white wigs of the high court of Zimbabwe. Her crime was recounted: Gatsi had given birth to a baby girl two years before and tied a nylon stocking around the newborn's mouth, suffocating it.

Advocates say the women, who insist they suffered miscarriages, got caught up in Mexico's cultural wars over abortion. The seven women were accused of killing their newborn babies and handed long prison sentences. They insisted they had suffered miscarriages and should not be punished; one claimed she wasn't even sure she was pregnant. The women have finally been freed, after years in jail and only after their cause was taken up by human rights organizations here and abroad and by a handful of determined legislators.

Advocates say the women, who insist they suffered miscarriages, got caught up in Mexico's cultural wars over abortion. The seven women were accused of killing their newborn babies and handed long prison sentences. They insisted they had suffered miscarriages and should not be punished; one claimed she wasn't even sure she was pregnant. The women have finally been freed, after years in jail and only after their cause was taken up by human rights organizations here and abroad and by a handful of determined legislators.

In what is purported to be the first documentary evidence of the extent of infanticide in India, U.S. researchers reported Saturday that 72% of all deaths of infant girls in a rural southern India region were the result of such murders. Speaking at an American Assn. for the Advancement of Science meeting, the researchers said one in every 10 female births in rural areas of Tamil Nadu state ended in infanticide, and they suspect that a much higher percentage of infanticides actually occurred.

In spite of her insistence that she was not the mother of a newborn found dead last year, a 22-year-old Santa Ana woman was convicted Monday of the murder of the infant. The boy was alive and healthy, weighed 7 pounds and was 21 inches long when he was born on March 15, 1996, authorities said.

The young farmer's wife never thought about murdering her newborn baby, she told police. Rather, an unspoken, centuries-old code of conduct in Hungary may have condemned the infant to death. After putting down her toddler for a nap, the woman stumbled into the kitchen of her two-room farmhouse. Her bloated belly burned. She collapsed on a sofa. The baby came in minutes. "I had to tear the umbilical cord myself," the 25-year-old woman, identified under Hungarian law only as Mrs. K.L.

Pediatricians aren't particularly known as aficionados of true crime books. But in this month's issue of the journal Pediatrics, Editor Dr. Jerold Lucey suggests his readers take a look at the genre. Lucey specifically recommends one of the newest, "Goodbye, My Little Ones" (Onyx Books, 1996), a paperback account of the life of Waneta Hoyt, a New York state mother whose five babies died between 1965 and 1971.

A 45-year-old woman has admitted suffocating eight babies immediately after giving birth to them, authorities said, in the latest, and worst, case of infanticide to rock France in recent years Dominique Cottrez, a resident of the quiet northern village of Villers-au-Tertre, said she hid the bodies in the garden of a previous home and in her current garage from 1989 to 2006 or '07, according to authorities. Though the case is unusual in its high death toll, the details are all too familiar in a nation where in recent years infants' bodies have been found, some in freezers and some burned.

A 45-year-old woman has admitted suffocating eight babies immediately after giving birth to them, authorities said, in the latest, and worst, case of infanticide to rock France in recent years Dominique Cottrez, a resident of the quiet northern village of Villers-au-Tertre, said she hid the bodies in the garden of a previous home and in her current garage from 1989 to 2006 or '07, according to authorities. Though the case is unusual in its high death toll, the details are all too familiar in a nation where in recent years infants' bodies have been found, some in freezers and some burned.

After 40 years of carrying a terrible secret, a man contacted Mendocino County authorities to report that his sister killed four of her babies between 1965 and 1970, authorities said. When sheriff's investigators tracked down Cheryl Athene Miller, 59, in San Francisco, where she was unemployed and living alone, she confessed to the murders and was arrested Monday, Sgt. Scott Poma said.

A McKinney woman accused of killing her 10-month-old daughter by cutting off the baby's arms with a kitchen knife went on trial Monday after pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. Police found Dena Schlosser, 37, covered in blood in her kitchen, still holding a knife and listening to a church hymn. During opening statements, her attorney said Schlosser clearly did not know right from wrong during the November 2004 slaying of baby Margaret.

Andrea Yates,who drowned her five chidlren, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity as she made her first court appearance since her 2002 capital murder convictions were overturned. State District Judge Belinda Hill in Houston set a March 20 trial date. Yates, 41, may remain in the custody of the Harris County Sheriff's Department until she is retried for the deaths of three of her children. Her lawyer, George Parnham, wants her sent to a hospital until the trial.

The mother accused of tossing her three small sons to their deaths in frigid San Francisco Bay pleaded not guilty Friday to murder and assault charges with a special circumstance of multiple homicide that could make her subject to the death penalty. Lashuan Harris, 23, of Oakland shuffled into San Francisco Superior Court wearing a red jumpsuit -- the color used to denote at-risk inmates.

A woman suspected of killing nine of her newborn children told investigators that she had given birth in secret but could not remember how the babies died because she was always drunk during labor, officials said. The 39-year-old woman, identified only as Sabine H., was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter after police found nine tiny bodies buried in flowerpots and a fish tank in the village of Brieskow-Finkenherd near the Polish border.

Why doesn't the Chinese government take its one-child policy to its logical conclusion and have tubal ligations performed on every woman immediately after the birth of her first (and, of course, only) child? Such a procedure would eliminate the heartbreak of repeated abortions and stop what is shaping up as nationwide female infanticide. ANN LATHAM AGREDA Los Angeles

Israeli archeologists have performed DNA analysis on the skeletons of 100 infants retrieved from a sewer under a 4th century Roman bathhouse in Ashkelon and found, to their surprise, that many of the infants were male. Infanticide of girls was common during the period, and researchers had expected that all of the skeletons would be female. Inscriptions in the bathhouse and erotically illustrated lamps from the site suggest that the bathhouse also served as a brothel, the team reports in the Jan.

A woman who shot her two daughters in an abandoned quarry and then led police to the bodies pleaded guilty to murder in Stevenson in a deal with prosecutors that is to send her to prison for 63 years. Charlene Dorcy, 39, killed the girls, 2 and 4, with a rifle last June in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Dorcy had stopped taking medication for paranoid schizophrenia in favor of herbal remedies because of concern about side effects, her husband said.

The sign stands outside a doctor's office in a leafy New Delhi neighborhood, a hand-painted warning that the law is upheld in this enclave of walled-off homes, imported cars and private clubs. "Here prenatal sex determination [boy or girl before birth] is not done. It is a punishable act," the sign says in both English and Hindi. The law, though, clearly has its loopholes. "The Indian mentality is like this: You have to have a son," said one New Delhi woman from a wealthy industrial family.