Mothers Who Kill

Outside of Ilinois, there hadn’t been much notice at all of the May 13 death of 3-year-old Katie McCarron at the hand of her mother, Dr. Karen McCarron (who confessed to police), until the opeds started appearing.

Police have charged McCarron, 37, with murder after she admitted she took her daughter to the home of the girl’s grandmother, where she held a plastic trash bag over her head until she stopped breathing.

“No amount of rationalization or putting myself in another mother’s shoes can assist me in wrapping my mind around the actions of Karen McCarron,” wrote Deborah Kendrick, who’s blind.

Kentrick, who has written a disability column for years for the Cincinnati Enquirer, wrote in the June 4 Columbus Dispatch,

Katherine McCarron . . . was diagnosed with autism at age 2. Her paternal grandfather describes her as a child who laughed at being tickled, said “I love you” and played with dolls. But autism means many different things in the lives of many children. . .

Her mother, a physician, and her father, an engineer, had agreed to live apart 20 months in order to get Katherine quality services in another state. Finally, though, they agreed it was time to bring the family back together at their home near Peoria, Ill.

We’ll never know what the little girl might have become or how she might have flourished in her upscale neighborhood with both parents. On May 13, Dr. McCarron confessed to putting a plastic bag over her 3-year-old’s head until she suffocated. (Read “Autistic kids fall victim to parents who run amok”.)

Peoria (IL) Journal Star coverage in the early days following the McCarron tragedy (here and here and here) and last week in the Chicago Tribune angered disability activists for what they felt was a double standard in which a mother who kills a child who’s disabled is seen as somehow more, uh, justified.

“Won’t somebody think about the children?!?!” asks RettDevil. ” What is wrong with these people?” asks Kendrick.

“Unhealthy to rationalize Katherine McCarron’s death” ran the headline of the oped by Dr. Sheila T. Romano which appeared in the Sunday, June 4 Peoria Journal-Star.

People were doing just that, she wrote, “saying out loud or in their minds that a mom is justified in killing her child, either because they think they can’t appreciate her plight or they actually think they can - and that it must be horrific.

“This kind of thinking is dangerous,” Romano continued.

As a matter of principle, our society does not - cannot - permit a mother or father killing their own child. If we start, where do we draw the line? Who decides which disabilities grant a mother the right to kill her child? The line could constantly shift.

If autism is OK, then is deafness? What about sex, race or religious affiliation? This is the same thinking that in the past has OK’d discrimination, institutionalization, segregation and even genocide. The history books are filled with examples of groups of people who at some time fell outside the line of protection provided by someone’s fuzzy definition of “normal.”

Much of the problem, say these oped writers, comes from the way mothers are told to think about the autism of their child. Kendrick, like many disability activists, puts no small blame on “educational tools” like the video “Autism Every Day,” which, Kendrick writes, “aired at a New York City fundraiser and again on MSNBC.

Some disability rights leaders fear it could persuade some people that raising an autistic child is so unbearable that murder, suicide or some combination thereof is understandable.. . .

One mom in Autism Every Day states pathetically that her child will never marry. “How do you know that?” is what my heart is screaming at her.

Did anyone know when [animal behaviorist and author] Temple Grandin was 3 or 6 or 10 that she would become a world renowned scientist and writer?

I’ve heard parents of deaf kids, blind kids, kids with Down syndrome and other disabilities make the same kinds of pronouncements: My child will never (fill in the blank). To all of them I say no human can predict what another human will accomplish.

The day after Kendrick’s and Romano’s opeds ran, novelist Cammie McGovern, who has an autistic son, wrote on the oped page of the New York Times that the problem was that parents of autistic kids were too often lured by the grail of “recovery”: “To aim for full recovery - for the person your child might have been without autism - is to enter a dangerous emotional landscape,” she wrote. (Read oped Autism’s Parent Trap.)

Photos of Katie McCarron have been made available to the online community several places, including on Kristina Chew’s blog, Autism Vox. Provided by Katie’s grandfather Michael McCarron, they show a happy little girl playing with toys; in one, a grinning Katie watches someone off-camera, a shimmering lake behind her.

Romano continues,

University of Alberta professor Dr. Dick Sobsey’s research found that parents who end the life of a child share the same characteristics, regardless of whether the child has a disability. Often they suffer from depression, anxiety and high stress. Sobsey says parents who cry out for services to prevent more deaths are essentially holding their own children hostage, when it must be the parents who hold their children’s lives precious above all else.

Yes, parents of children with developmental disabilities need help, support and compassion. But none should be held to a lesser standard.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under Criminal Justice & Prisons, Disability Issues, Parenthood & Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.