[Merry]

This sounds as unlikely as the expert who said middle aged men who lost their wives would then produce more children with their older daughters, and wrote this as if it was commonplace.

I have read quite a few contemporary newspaper articles about infanticide cases and generally they seemed to be young unmarried girls away from home and in service who concealed their pregnancy, gave birth in silence and sometimes in the middle of the night in a shared bedroom, and then removed the child to an outhouse or some such where the body was then found within a short time by another servant. There would then be a lot of questions over whether the baby had cried or taken a breath etc. Everyone involved was very shocked and the mother - whether she was formerly punished or not - had to survive an inquest and court case and her personal life being splashed all over the papers for friends and relatives to gossip over. I realise maybe it would only be the more obvious cases that would end up in a court room, but I really don't think the majority of women would be ready to suffocate their child because the baby was inconvenient or whatever.