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Article Excerpt
WHEN READING THE NEWS COVERAGE surrounding the inquest into the starvation death of an infant in a homeless women's shelter, it became clear that this case was a horrifying example of how the discourse of mother hood and the individualization of responsibility can work together to regulate the behaviour of mothers. The infant's mother, Renee Heikamp, was labelled a "bad mother" and held up as an object of contempt by the press. When analysing the media reactions to this case, one cannot fail to note the public horror at the image of an infant dying while in the care of the same person expected to devote and sacrifice her life for him. The purpose of this paper is to ponder the role that concepts of motherhood played in portraying this infant's death as a consequence of the actions of his "bad mother," as opposed to a consequence of an inadequate welfare system. More specifically, it will explore why one interpretation of this case seized the public's imagination and informed the media accounts of it. Examining how this one mother was constructed as a "bad mother" further helps to understand how hegemonic notions of "good mothers" are reinforced and perpetuated. By highlighting the economic, political and social situation in Ontario in the late 1990s-early 2000s, and Renee's place in that context, we can see the use of the "myth of the good mother" in operation to deflect responsibility for what happened away from the state and social services system and, instead, heap it on to an individual mother. This particular display of mother blame exposes how mothers who are marginalized because of poverty are not only held up as "dangerous anti-models of motherhood" (Connolly, 2000a: 266) when held up to the same (idealized) standards for mothering, but are also increasingly vulnerable to regulation and criminalization when they fail to mother according to a fictive model of "good mothering."
This paper will first outline the details surrounding this infant's death. Second, the discourse of mother blame and how it intersects with neo-liberalism's individualization of responsibility will be summarized. Third, evidence will be presented of the cultural norms pertaining to mothers that dominated the media coverage of the Heikamp inquest. Finally, this individual case study will be situated within a broader discussion of how the "bad mother" label is currently being used for political purposes not only by the public at large, but also by the state. Mother blaming does more than simply divert critical attention away from the context(s) in which mothering occurs; in particular, the scapegoating of "bad mothers" in a neo-liberal climate serves to intensify already existing social antagonisms, which are increasingly marked by the criminalization of those on the margins of society.
Jordan and Renee Heikamp
Renee Heikamp was 19 years old when her infant son, Jordan, died of starvation in a women's shelter in downtown Toronto in 1997. Renee was homeless at the time and had been for about four years prior to becoming pregnant. Upon Jordan's birth, hospital staff called the Catholic Children's Aid Society (CAS) to intervene because of their concerns about Renee's ability to care for her son. Nine days after the birth, the CAS social worker assigned to the case, Angela Martin, arranged for Renee and Jordan to be discharged and moved into a women's shelter. Thirty-seven days later, Jordan was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. An autopsy revealed that Jordan died of chronic starvation. Renee had been breastfeeding Jordan, but her breast milk had dried up and the formula that she was feeding him was overdiluted.
Both Renee and the social worker were charged with criminal negligence causing death. In 1998, after a 13-month preliminary hearing into the death, Madam Justice Mary Hogan of the Ontario Court of Justice ruled that the case would not proceed to trial because of a lack of evidence of "wanton and reckless disregard" for the life or safety of another person, the requisite element for criminal negligence causing death, on the part of either Renee or the social worker. The judge ruled that "the death of baby Jordan was a terrible tragedy--one made even more so by the fact that it might have been prevented" (R. v. Heikamp and Martin, 1999, at 2): "The difficulty here seemed to be that everyone felt that somebody else was taking responsibility with the result that no one took full responsibility" (Ibid., at 17). In April 2001, after a four-month investigation, a coroner's inquest ruled that the starvation death of Jordan was a homicide (1) and made recommendations for changes to the child protection system to prevent similar deaths in the future. The recommendations of the coroner's jury implicated the entire child protection system in Jordan's death: changes were ordered to be undertaken by child protection workers, the Children's Aid Society, homeless shelters, hospitals, public health departments, and the Ministry of Community and Social Services.
Discourse of Motherhood
The images and ideas that surround motherhood and which establish ideals about "good" and "bad" mothers and mothering constitute the discourse of motherhood. The contemporary discourse of motherhood rests on claims made "true" by science, through psychoanalytic theory and child development research, for example (Glenn, 1994; Thurer, 1994). This discourse is complex, as it is determined on the basis of gender, class, race and other social relations (Glenn, Chang and Forcey, 1994), as well as dynamic, but there are several core assumptions that constitute this belief system against which women's lives are judged.
First, a considerable weight of responsibility is placed onto the mother for the healthy development of children. This creates a belief in an "allpowerful" mother. This idea manifests itself in two forms: "the tendency to blame the mother on the one hand, and a fantasy of maternal perfectibility on the other" (Chodorow and Contratto, 1982: 55)--blame if the child exhibits emotional or social developmental difficulties, and idealization because the mother is left with the enormous task of ensuring a good and proper foundation for the child's emotional and social development, albeit with little or no support or interference. As a result of her important status, the mother becomes "the image upon which shared fears and anxieties are projected" (Finzi, 1996: 167).
Second, mothering is considered to be socially very important work; consequently, the characteristics of motherhood are strongly associated with the idea of self-sacrifice (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982; Glenn, Chang and Forcey, 1994; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998; Rich, 1986). The idea of the "good mother" promotes...
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