# ‘[M]ercy is justice…and should not be denied’: Lord Dawson, the British medico-legal community, and the Infanticide Act, 1938

## TL;DR

This paper examines how Lord Dawson and British medical professionals influenced the 1938 Infanticide Act, which redefined legal responses to maternal child killing.

## Contribution

The paper highlights the role of medical practitioners in shaping infanticide law and connects it to broader societal concerns about motherhood and national health.

## Key findings

- The 1938 Infanticide Act redefined infanticide as a distinct legal category from murder based on postpartum mental disturbances.
- Medical professionals played a key role in advocating for the 1938 Act, reflecting broader concerns about maternal mental health and citizenship.
- Dawson’s reforms were influenced by contemporary psychiatric debates about the link between insanity and female reproductive states.

## Abstract

In December 1937, influential physician and politician Lord Dawson of Penn introduced an Infanticide Bill into the House of Lords. Seven months later, following minor amendments, Dawson’s Bill passed into law as the Infanticide Act, 1938. This legislation significantly altered the earlier provisions of the Infanticide Act, 1922, which introduced the offence of infanticide into English and Welsh courtrooms for the first time. Under Dawson’s reforms, a woman could be found guilty of infanticide rather than capital murder if the killing of her child, aged no more than one year old, could be attributed to a disturbance in the balance of the mother’s mind following childbirth or from lactation. Although the language and implications of the 1938 Act have ignited significant debate within legal scholarship, the creation of Dawson’s Bill and the leading role medical practitioners played in its enactment have received limited attention from historians. This article helps to address this gap by analyzing the critical response of the inter-war British medical profession to the question of infanticide reform against a backdrop of growing psychiatric ambivalence about a causal link between insanity and female reproductive states. Crucially, this paper contends that ancillary concerns over citizenship, motherhood, and the health of the nation informed Dawson’s motivations and justification for infanticide reform during the 1930s. It also seeks to foreground the physician’s distinct contribution to the birth of the 1938 Act by underscoring his efforts in devising and promoting the Bill within Parliament and among inter-war medical and legal communities.