Just weeks after Karen McCarron suffocated her 3-year-old autistic daughter, a Pekin mother is accused of trying to kill her 4-year-old daughter who suffers from cerebral palsy.

It’s almost impossible to understand what could drive a mother to kill her own child, but there’s an interesting article from a 2002 issue of Slate magazine that tackles the topic. It’s called “When Parents Kill,” by Dahlia Lithwick.

In addition to giving the most common explanations for why parents kill their children (mothers: “because the child is unwanted; out of mercy; as a result of some mental illness in the mother; in retaliation against a spouse; as a result of abuse,” fathers: “because they feel they have lost control over their finances, or their families, or the relationship, or out of revenge for a perceived slight or infidelity”), the article points out an intriguing inequity in punishment for these crimes:

A 1969 study by Dr. Phillip Resnick, the “father” of maternal filicide (the murder of a child by a parent), found that while mothers convicted of murdering their children were hospitalized 68 percent of the time and imprisoned 27 percent of the time, fathers convicted of killing their children were sentenced to prison or executed 72 percent of the time and hospitalized only 14 percent of the time. More recent British studies by P.T. D’Orban support these findings.

The reason for this, the article explains, is that our society still views children as the mother’s property. Since one is considered criminal for destroying someone else’s property but crazy for destroying their own property, mothers who kill their own children are considered mentally ill while fathers who commit the same crime are considered common murderers.

At first, I was taken aback by the use of the word “property” in reference to children. It just kind of makes you bristle, doesn’t it? But use whatever word you want — the fact is that our society recognizes a stronger bond between mother and child than father and child. And thus, we incarcerate/execute fathers for filicide, but hospitalize mothers who commit the same crime.

This bias is reflected in print and television news coverage of these cases. Indeed, we can readily think of McCarron, Susan Smith, and Andrea Yates as high-profile cases. Can you name any cases of fathers killing their children? They don’t get as much attention in the press. When they are covered, they’re treated as any other murder case.

In the cases of McCarron and the Pekin woman, once we find out that the children had/have autism and cerebral palsy, respectively, we immediately assume that the mother must have contemplated this a mercy killing. We want to believe that it wasn’t a wanton act of violence or done for selfish motives, but that it was an attempt — however grievously misguided — to do something altruistic.

Would we feel the same way if the father killed or attempted to kill his child? Maybe. But I think we would be less inhibited to impute nefarious motives to the father.

Despite these inequities and attempts to explain parents’ actions, it will forever remain a mystery to me how a parent could kill his or her own child.