By: Nasiphi Mvunyiswa

Normally mothers are protective over their children. They would never let anything or anyone harm their kids.  But in some cases, children need protection from their own mothers.  There have been alarming numbers of mothers who have killed their children over the years.

The world was introduced to this horrendous crime in 1993 when Oprah went to interview four mothers in jail who had killed their own children. One of the mothers had smothered her child to death, the other had put her two month old baby in the freezer when she couldn’t get him to stop crying, and another mother had beat two of her children to death.

Over the years this unspeakable crime has become almost common.  Just last year Oprah had another interview on Oprah’s Next Chapter with a mother who killed her child, Shaquan Duley.  Duley suffocated her two sons with her bare hands; she admits to Oprah that she looked one of her sons in the eye while she was doing this.  She then put them in the car and drove to a river and rolled them into the river.

Others cases are more horrid than others.  Megan Huntsman had strangled and suffocated six of her new born babies.  She did this from 1996 to 2006. When police got a tip off from her estranged husband, they searched her house and found six dead infants stuffed into a cardboard box.  China Arnold put her three week old baby into a microwave and burned herto death in 2005.

A mother killing her own child seems inconceivable. What would cause a mother to do this?  Most mothers who commit these crimes aren’t mentally stable and get put into a mental institution instead of going to jail.  Andrea

Yates drowned all five of her children in the bathtub; she told the police she did this because Satan had told her to do it so they can be saved from hell.  Another case is of Brenda Drayton- she strangled her baby because she believed it was “the devil’s baby”. One of the most bizarre cases include Christina Miracle who she killed her six-year-old son in a weird religious ceremony where she believed she was resurrecting her dead brother. The child was beaten then suffocated to death.

Another cause of this crime is post-partum depression, which is also called post-natal depression. Some mothers suffer from depression when they have just given birth and don’t feel connected to their new born baby. They end up not thinking clearly, which sometimes leads to them killing their own child.

These women seem normal to the people around them; they seem like normal mothers that care for their children. Most of these women didn’t even have prior criminal records.  No one ever seems to see this coming.