To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

While newborns comprise 33 percent of all victims of filicide, the true number of neonates can never be known. We cannot account for the murder of a human we do not know exists.

further complicated by prosecution of miscarriage

“We still view children as the mother’s property,” wrote Dahlia Lithwick in a 2002 Slate article about filicidal parents. “Since destroying one’s own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else’s property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals who go to jail.”

The state can’t seem to keep the roads paved; you think we should trust them with life-and-death decisions?”

the kind of mother who nursed Eldon for fourteen months and slept nuzzled up with him, as she once had with Gavin.

tf does this mean? like... we've gone well beyond two years and cuddle to sleep and I'd like to think I'm a well adjusted mother

But I expected him to do more for Amanda, and I expected him to as much out of concern for her as for the rest of us. I thought we deserved answers and not just results.

who is we- the general public?

A mother and her child live on the border of protection and destruction. This border, theirs alone, is not axiomatically fraught.

what

Jason had told them Amanda said she would be taking the children “maybe [to] the beach,” which, as point of reference, is eighty miles from Portland—I

it definitely isn't close!

It’s a near-immutable fact that parents will put their children’s welfare ahead of or at least on par with their own. We assume this to be built into who we are. Or I had assumed this. Because I could not under any circumstance see myself dropping my child from a bridge with the intent to harm her, I did not see how Amanda could have done this to her children. We see through our own lenses.

at least Nancy admits this

Krakauer, John. Under the Banner of Heaven.

for writing on true crime maybe?