Cryptic Pregnancies and their Legal Consequences in Pre-Modern Finland

This article investigates a woman's total unawareness of being pregnant and the legal consequences of this phenomenon in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Finland. Totally unexpected births of viable neonates have an occurrence rate of 1 in 2,500 in the modern Western world. The term used for this phenomenon in history is ‘cryptic pregnancy’. It refers to the medically defined condition ‘denial of pregnancy’ in its extreme form, in which the pregnancy is revealed to the woman only with the birth of her baby. The accounts of cryptic pregnancy given by the usual suspects of infanticide were mainly treated as lies, and the acts were condemned as involuntary infanticide. However, cryptic pregnancy was a recognised corporal condition in medical texts of the time. Consequently, unawareness of pregnancy has to be taken into account not only in research on modern neonaticide but also in historical research dealing with infanticide and its treatment in court proceedings.
Source: Social History of Medicine - Category: History of Medicine Authors: Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research