asserts that ‘many agreed that infancy lasted until age seven’. 5 Therefore, for the purposes of
this investigation, the term infanticide will include child victims up to the age of seven. Modern
interpretations of life cycles differ somewhat to the Middle Ages when infancy and adolescence
varied significantly depending on social and marital status. Historians and sociologists have
described infanticide as ‘a crime of desperation, branding it a woman’s crime, and often
specifically a single woman’s crime’ due to poverty and insufficient access to effective
contraception