What Weren't We Discussing about Andrea Yates?
by Joan Kennedy
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume
22,
Number 3.
The elephant in the middle of the room to which no one paid attention in the
Andrea Yates case was birth control. When the Houston woman who drowned her five
children (aged seven, five, three, two, and six months) in a bathtub last June
was found guilty of capital murder on March 12, the feminist controversy that
had swirled around her for almost a year had initially centered on whether or
not she was a victim herself. Did her act exemplify the patriarchal nature of
American society, as Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women
(NOW) said last summer? Or was such feminist support just a way to excuse a
cold-blooded killer-as individualist-feminist columnists Cathy Young and Wendy
McElroy both said in different ways, in order to push a feminist victimology
agenda: the often-prevailing idea that, by the nature of our society, women are
programmed to be victimized by men? Toward the end of the trial, in March, the
controversy centered on legal issues, as the image of a woman not just
"depressed" but seriously delusional began to emerge in bits and
pieces from the courtroom. And after the verdict it was husband Russell Yates
who was controversial—was he a victim of the medical establishment himself, or
had he failed to do all he might have done to lessen his wife's stress?
What he could have done, of course, as is tragically apparent, was to wear a
condom. But that wasn't enunciated in all the Monday-morning quarterbacking that
went on after the verdict and sentencing. What no one seemed to discuss, perhaps
because doing so would not be politically correct, was the exact nature of the
religious ideas that Andrea and her husband had adopted. Russell Yates was
seemingly a man of the nineties, if not the twenty-first century-a National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) computer engineer at Houston's
Johnson Space Center. But computers and engineering did not inform the couple's
lifestyle. Until Andrea attempted suicide twice after the birth of their fourth
son in 1999, the family lived in a converted bus. Russell then moved the family
into a house, and it was decided that Andrea should home-school their children.
He has been quoted as saying that they wanted to live "a simple traditional
life" and that they wanted to avoid "social integration."
(Neighbors who got him to bring the three oldest boys to a birthday party the
weekend before the killing told a reporter that it was the first time they had
met the Yateses since they moved into their house two years before.)
They had apparently been very influenced by an itinerant preacher and his
wife, who also lived in a bus and home-schooled their children. According to a
report in the Houston Star-Tribune, preacher Michael Woroniecki believed
that society damages children, and that by the time a child is fourteen or
fifteen, it is too late to undo the damage. "It might keep them from
following the Lord long-term," explained Russell Yates in court. (His
wife's explanation of the killings was to save the children from hell.)
Suzy Spencer, who is writing a book about Andrea Yates, made some additional
points on a Sally Jessy Raphael Show aired before the verdict was
announced. She said the preacher believed "All women are witches" and
that men are wimps, beliefs that he put in a brochure entitled "The Witch
and the Wimp." She also pointed out that, following her suicide attempts,
Andrea Yates was put on the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, and the couple was told
that, as long as she took her medication and had no more children, she would be
all right.
But less than three months after she was released from the hospital, Andrea
was pregnant again. Spencer put it this way. "They both wanted more
children, according to him." Andrea Yates was asked in a videotaped
interview by a psychiatrist, according to the Associated Press, "what she
thought about all the pregnancies and if she tried to prevent them."
"'They were planned,' Andrea responded. 'I was letting it happen.'"
And so was Russell.
When Katie Couric asked Russell on the March 18 Today Show how he
responded to accusations that he was not attentive, that he left his wife alone,
that they shouldn't have continued to have children "after you'd been told
by doctors not to," he ignored the last part of her question. "If only
I had done this, if only I had done that," he responded. "Obviously, I
would have stayed home that morning."
Whether or not, as Russell Yates has been quoted as saying, the desire to
have a fifth child was mutual, when the doctors he apparently trusted told him
that she should take medication and avoid pregnancy, he only accepted half of
the advice. He made sure she took the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, but he didn't
say to his wife, "For your health's sake, we must not have another child at
this time." Suppose their religion forbade the use of birth control?
There's always abstinence.
Birth control is certainly an appropriate action for a couple to take when
life is in danger. But many religious groups not only forbid all reproductive
choice to their believers, they often want to forbid it to everyone. On the day
that the verdict was announced, a New York City television station aired the
following promo for a news broadcast: "Today at 6:00—Catholicism and
contraception. Cardinal Egan travels to Albany to battle legislation that
conflicts with church beliefs." My late mother, staunch Catholic that she
was, never could understand this teaching of the church. "If you are
against abortion," she would say in bewilderment, "you have to be for
birth control!"
"Letting it happen" is not planning. Someone—a husband, a
minister, a bureaucrat—told Andrea Yates that it was right for her to
"let it happen." Somehow, the lines between birth control and abortion
and abortion and child murder were blurred in her mind, as they seem to be in
the minds of many religious leaders-and she ended up in effect aborting her
children, long after they were born.
Her husband and family were shocked and horrified. As various family members
explained over and over in television interviews, no one ever suspected that she
was capable of harming her children, especially not Russell Yates. He just
thought she might kill herself.
Joan Kennedy Taylor is the author of Reclaiming the Mainstream:
Individualist Feminism Rediscovered and the vice president of Feminists for
Free Expression.
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