should a book of shadows have a table of contents

Deborah Eappen noted in an interview, 'People write to us that we are greedy, that we did it, that we made poor decisions, that I am at fault. She was seen as derelict in her maternal duties because she had hired an au pair so that she could work three days a week outside the home. Regardless of who was directly to blame for Matthew's death, it was the baby's mother who was deemed ultimately responsible. Deborah Eappen was put on trial in the court of public opinion and found guilty. Putatively not a suspect in the murder case, Dr. A sign carrying the slogan given in the epigraph to this chapter captured the hostility I heard expressed over the airwaves and in conversations on subways and buses concerning who was really to blame for baby Matthew's untimely death.ĭeborah Eappen and her husband, Sunil, had employed Louise to look after their two children while he worked full-time as an anesthesiologist and she worked part-time as an ophthalmologist. Picketers marched daily outside the Middlesex County Courthouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, often holding placards picturing baby Matthew's face.

There was remarkable unity, however, in the public's vilification of Matthew's mother. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion public sentiment was divided as to whether Woodward was innocent or guilty. When Court TV provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial of eighteen-year-old Louise Woodward, a British au pair, for the 1997 death of baby Matthew Eappen, viewers nationwide were mesmerized. Reactions to one subset, women who could ostensibly afford to stay at home but do not, are especially intense. Despite these realities, the American public remains ambivalent toward mothers who leave their children in the care of others. Most rely on some form of paid childcare. Seventy percent of all mothers in the United States work outside the home. picket sign, 1997 trial of British au pair Louise Woodward

Should a book of shadows have a table of contents