This chapter concerns the married women who were charged with infanticide. Like the communities and accomplices discussed in the previous chapter, they were not the usual suspects. As we have already seen, early modern legislators considered infanticide a crime of single women, despite the fact that one of western culture's most famous infanticides was Medea, a married woman. The ancient tale of her murder of her children is a reminder that, as well as different kinds of perpetrators of infanticide, there were also different circumstances and motives. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this has been masked by the weight of discussion about unmarried motherhood. In contrast, when a married woman killed her infant, her crime attracted pamphleteers who naturally found these dramatic and less frequent crimes more marketable. For those seeking to investigate infanticide in the early modern period, they open up the range of circumstances under which an infant might be murdered.

However, strong associations were made between married women and breastfeeding, whether they nursed the infant themselves or employed a wetnurse. As a result, some writers regarded wetnursing with such abhorrence that it was written of in similar terms to infanticide, as discussed below.