She then wrapped the baby in clear plastic trash bags and disposed of him in a garbage can. She then returned to her prom activities. A janitor later found the baby in the garbage can. Drexler was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the murder of her newborn baby, but will most likely be paroled in three years.
A few hours after giving birth in March in a Fairfax motel room, Abigail Caliboso left her baby, wrapped in a cotton towel, on the floor of a portable toilet at a construction site in Delaware. The 19-year-old nursing student from Woodbridge and the baby's father, Jose Ocampo, 18, of Chantilly, were too frightened to tell their families that they had had a child. Last week, the two teenagers pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a Delaware court and agreed to accept five-year prison terms, pending the judge's decision. .
NEONATICIDE AND INFANTICIDE BACKGROUND.
In bygone eras, even back to ancient times, killing a newborn was a common practice. In the 1860s, when Philadelphia first began publishing health statistics, a dead infant was found abandoned in Philadelphia every other day, on average," said Roger Lane, a Haverford College history professor and author of the new book "Murder in America: A History. There were many reasons, Lane said. In Victorian times, for instance, servant-class girls were often sexually exploited - "seduced and abandoned," in the parlance of the period. Adoption was rare because of the stigma attached to "bastards." Anyway, orphaned newborns had little chance of survival in the days before pasteurized milk and baby formula. Abortion, while legal during much of the 1800s, was expensive and dangerous. And, finally, neonaticide was easy to get away with because women delivered at home and police lacked the technology to prove that a dead infant had been born alive. .
Since baby-dumpers were typically poor, desperate, and, in many cases, victimized, society viewed them as pitiable.