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Après avoir fait le point sur les connaissances en matière de « néonaticide », « filicide » et « infanticide », cet ouvrage se propose une analyse de situations infanticides à partir de dizaines de cas, depuis la mort du nouveau-né, parfois répétée plusieurs fois, jusqu'au meurtre de masse (plusieurs enfants). Ces mères qui ont tué leur(s) bébé(s) ou leurs enfants sont habitées par une mélancolie particulière qui est au centre de ces histoires dramatiques, mais cependant toutes singulières. Cette mélancolie n'est pas une maladie mentale et se doit d'être expliquée, car incomprise, par le clinicien lors de procès souvent fort médiatisés.L'ouvrage, issu de l'expérience clinique de l'auteur, tente de décrypter et de répondre à une interrogation essentielle qui fait aujourd'hui débat : Comment certaines femmes se retrouvent-elles face à un besoin de « néantisation » qui les fait se supprimer en tant que mères ou conserver comme témoins de leur « maternalité » les corps de leurs nourrissons décédés ? Professeur de Psychopathologie et Psychologie Légale,doyen de la Faculté des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société, expert près la Cour d'Appel de Rouen.

The basic question discussed is whether abortion & infanticide are morally acceptable practices. The central issue involved is that of what properties an organism must possess in order to have a serious right to life. The answer proposed is that an organism cannot have a serious right to life unless it is capable of self-consciousness, & an organism is said to be self-conscious only if it regards itself as a continuing subject of experiences & other mental states. This answer is defended by arguing that there is a conceptual connection between rights & desires, so that an individual cannot have a given right unless it is capable of having the corresponding desire. It is then suggested that human fetuses & newborn infants do not, simply as a matter of empirical fact, possess self-consciousness, & hence do not have a serious right to life. Both abortion & infanticide are thus morally acceptable practices. A critical survey is included of alternative views on the morality of abortion & infanticide. Liberal positions are criticized for selecting cutoff points, past which the killing of a human organism is held to be seriously wrong, that do not rest upon any morally signif diff in the developing organism before & after the cutoff point. The extreme conservative position on abortion, according to which the killing of a human organism at any point in its development from a zygote on is always seriously wrong, is shown to be tenable only if what is referred to as the potentiality principle is sound: the potentiality principle states that an organism may have a serious right to life simply by virtue of certain properties that it will later come to have. An argument is presented which shows that the potentiality principle is unsound, & hence that the extreme conservative position on abortion must be rejected. Modified AA.

Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England explores one of society's darkest crimes using archival sources and discussing its representation in the drama, pamphlets and broadside ballads of the early modern period. It takes the reader on a journey through the streets and taverns where street literature was hawked, to the playhouses where the crime was dramatized, and the courts where it was tried and punished. Using a regional microstudy of coroners' inquests and churchwardens' presentments, coupled with theories of liminality, marginality and rites of passage, it reveals complex and contradictory attitudes to infants, women and the crime. As well as considering unwed women, the most common perpetrators of infanticide, the study shows that married women, men and the local community were also culpable, and the many reasons for this. Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England is set in its European and historical contexts, revealing surprising continuities across time.