commentary by Patrick H. Moore
In North America, respecting one’s parents is generally thought to be a fine and exemplary thing. On the other hand, many children are either taught, or learn as members of the permissive gerneration, to “look out for number one” which, of course, can drive parents to distraction. There’s nothing tougher than trying to deal with a stubborn adolescent who is absolutely certain that he or she knows everything, or damned near everything, and certainly knows far more than their ignorant parents. This troubling teen tendency has led one of my more cynical friends – an energetic fellow who has raised, supported and educated three fine girls — to announce solemnly to whoever would listen: “Teenagers don’t know diddly-squat.”
The uneasy balance between self-assertive kids and their bemused parents is a constant in many North American homes.
In contrast to this uneasy balance of power, we have the “traditional” approach to child-rearing favored by “traditional” peoples the world over. In this model, the parents are absolutely in command; the children learn from an early age that the consequences of crossing one’s parents can be severe. It could be argued that the “respect” for their parents that these children are inculcated with from an early age, actually more closely resembles fear.
Notwithstanding whatever combination of “fear” and “respect” these children may feel for their parents, while growing up, they cannot help but become progressively more aware that here in North America, many children have rights that would be unheard of in traditional cultures and enjoy a considerable amount of independence.
Within this context, children who are raised by traditional parents can find themselves “caught in a crossfire” when it comes to such issues as sexuality, pregnancy and the right to have a safe and therapeutic abortion.
In the case of Sarah Leung, 28, of Vancouver, Canada, these issues, and the decisions she made concerning them, has led her to a horrible impasse in which she is charged with two counts of second-degree-murder for allegedly killing her two newborn infants after steadfastly concealing her pregnancies.
Vivian Luk of the Canadian Press writes:
A Vancouver woman accused of killing her newborn sons was so afraid of her parents finding out about her pregnancies that she gave birth alone in the family bathroom and then secretly disposed of the infants, says the Crown.
Sarah Leung, 28, was charged with second-degree murder after the body of a baby boy was found in a plastic bag outside the home in April 2009.
Police alleged Leung gave birth to a second baby boy in March 2010 and killed that baby as well, though the infant’s body was never found.
In a court hearing on Monday, Crown lawyer Sandra Cunningham informed the jury on the first day of Leung’s trial that at some point while being questioned, Leung confessed to police that she was afraid to tell her parents about her pregnancy.
“She told (a detective) her parents didn’t really approve of getting pregnant before marriage, and she was scared to tell them because she knew they would be unhappy,” Cunningham said in her opening statement.
“She knew she had done something wrong against them, that they wouldn’t have liked, so she hid everything from them.”
At Monday’s hearing, while the crown described the sequence of events that police believe led to the deaths of the two baby boys, Ms. Leung, wearing jeans and a black jacket over a grey hooded sweater, listened quietly.
It is an age-old tale that goes like this:
Ms. Leung was dating a man with whom she became intimate. Then, as surely as the night follows the day, she became pregnant with her lover’s child.
The Crown prosecutor stated that Ms. Leung’s boyfriend, whom she eventually married, was aware of the pregnancy and was even happy about it, but the accused, based on her belief that her parents would be furious if brought into the loop, kept their relationship and her pregnancy completely secret from her family.
It appears to me that in a peculiar way, Ms. Leung’s furtive activities, while certainly demonstrating the fear she felt for her parents, may have also been a way – albeit misguided – to assert her freedom and independence.
And who knows, it might have worked except for one huge and irrevocable problem that pushed the accused to the breaking point. In the summer of 2008, Ms. Leung became pregnant.
Now if either of my daughters had become pregnant as teens, the burning question would have been “to abort or not to abort” or whether to put the child up for adoption if the decision was made to take the pregnancy to full term. Fortunately, we were never faced with that challenging dilemma.
To put this into context, Ms. Leung was approximately 23 years old when she became pregnant in 2008. According to the Crown, in April 2009, the accused delivered her baby into a toilet at the house where she still lives with her parents and brother.
Nothing has been disclosed as to whether Ms. Leung even considered the possibility of getting an abortion or choosing to go the adoption route. As a full-grown woman in Canada, could she have obtained a therapeutic abortion through the Canadian health services without her parents being any the wiser? Did she consider this option? I don’t know.
I am told that after drowning her child, Ms. Leung put the infant in a plastic bag, cleaned up any tell-tale signs of her delivery, and told her boyfriend that she had a miscarriage. Crown Prosecutor Cunningham told the jury.
“She put her baby boy, still, inside the plastic bag, outside between her house and the next door neighbour’s, and carried on as if nothing had happened.”
“No one suspected a thing.”
Right at this moment, it becomes horribly clear that this appears to be far more than simply a case of cultural identity issues and the clash between the old ways and the new. Rather, Ms. Leung’s bizarre act (although apparently not bizarre to her) is a clear sign of grievous family pathology. This is the 90-ton elephant in the room that should be front and center in this case.
Although based on what I can gather, Crown prosecutor Cunningham seems to be spewing little if any of the contempt and vitriol that we might expect if a case of this nature were being tried in the U.S., it is nevertheless a fact that this is being handled as a very serious criminal matter. Instead of recognizing that Ms. Leung is a young woman with severe emotional/mental issues, she is apparently being tried as an ordinary citizen.
With my very limited knowledge of the workings of the Canadian justice system, I don’t know if the defendant’s lawyers can defend her in a manner that properly and objectively faces the fact that Ms. Leung is, in a certain sense non compos mentis. Even if she is perfectly sane in other respects, faced with this unsolvable inter-generational dilemma, brought to the flash point by the actual births of the children, she acted like a crazy person.
Had she been in a rational frame of mind, she would surely have realized that given her age, and given the fact she apparently had a supportive boyfriend, if she informed her parents that she had given birth, although they might fume, roar, or even assault her, there wouldn’t really be much they could do about it beyond disowning her. Which, I imagine, is exactly what they might have done.
* * * * *
Let’s look at the actions and statements of Ms. Leung and her parents, who ultimately, learned the sad truth that their daughter had killed not one, but two of her newborns.
Ms. Leung’s father finds the first dead baby outside the house in a plastic bag. Ms. Leung had apparently disposed of it in the common area between their house and their neighbor’s house. Because the father does not speak English, he had his son call the police. When the police question the parents, they stated that they saw nothing unusual in the way their daughter responded to the news that the father had just found a dead baby in a plastic bag next to their house.
“She reassured them she knew nothing about the baby or how it came to be in a plastic bag outside,” said Cunningham.
Of course the DNA testing caught up with Ms. Leung and by August of 2009, the police knew that the dead baby belonged to Leung and her boyfriend. Prosecutor Cunningham believes that by this time, Ms. Leung was pregnant with her second child.
The jurors were informed that Ms. Leung and her boyfriend were married in November 2009 and were planning to move in together after the baby was born. Ms. Leung, of course, said nothing to her family about her marriage and pregnancy.
But then in March of 2010, when Ms. Leung was due to give birth to her second baby boy, the madness once again overcame her.
After the baby had stopped breathing, Ms. Leung allegedly put him in a plastic bag which she placed inside their garbage can, covering the package with a piece of cardboard. The garbage men came and collected the garbage which, predictably, ended up as landfill.
Understandably, the police have chosen not to search the landfill.
On Monday afternoon, Ms. Leung’s mother, whose name, following Canadian procedures, is covered by a publication ban, “testified that Leung is a quiet, self-conscious young woman who rarely talked about her personal relationships.”
“She said she didn’t notice anything physically or emotionally different about her daughter leading up to the day her husband found the first baby outside their home.”
Leung’s mother explained to those assembled that she and her husband taught their children to respect themselves and their elders, study and work hard, and value family. She disapproves of sex before marriage, and cannot accept her children having casual sexual relationships.
“If you have the bond of marriage there, then on both sides there would be a goal when you do something and you’ll cherish each other more,” she said through a Cantonese interpreter.
Either I’m dense or this last statement doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Ms. Leung and her boyfriend/husband eventually did “have the bond of marriage” although it obviously has not saved her from this disaster.
* * * * *
To break it down:
Ms. Leung’s parents had expectations for their daughter that – caught in the cross-fire of the generational gap — she could not possibly meet.
Their communication skills were virtually non-existent. There was little meaningful dialogue within the household.
Ms. Leung hid important information from both her parents and her husband.
On both occasions, when confronted by the reality of giving birth, Ms. Leung phased into an irrational state, a fact the Crown seems to have at least partially recognized given that they have opted for second- degree rather the first-degree-murder charges. My fantasy is that during the births, killings, and quick disposals, Ms. Leung was in a fugue state, a shadow world in which one does things one normally would not do.
This is one of the saddest cases imaginable and I would hope that the Crown, in conjunction with Ms. Leung’s lawyers, would recognize Ms. Leung’s severe mental imbalance and the role it played in the children’s deaths. There should be a hospital commitment and treatment program for this poor woman, not an extended term of imprisonment.