Five infants laid to rest as US watches and wonders

A scene of unbearable sadness played out in Clear Lake, Texas, yesterday, as five young children drowned by their mother in the family bathtub were laid to rest in a funeral service attended by distraught family, friends and neighbours – and besieged by television cameras.

The small white coffins of Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, six months, were laid out in a semi-circle in the Clear Lake of Church of Christ, all of them adorned with angel figures and floral sprays.

"It's a time when you say, 'How could God let this happen?'" their father, Russell Yates, said as he led the funeral service, breaking down several times as he talked about his dead children.

"I don't think there are words in any language that can describe what has happened," the church's pastor, Byron Fike, said.

Last week's killings were the most dramatic instance of infanticide in recent American memory. The mother, Andrea Yates, is in police custody without bail and could face the death penalty if prosecutors choose to pursue criminal charges rather than accept her likely defence of innocence by reason of insanity.

The cold, calculating manner in which Mrs Yates drowned each of her children in turn and even chased the oldest, Noah, around the house before dragging him to his death has stunned the American public and raised questions in the media about the circumstances that led to such an startling act.

And yet, according to experts in the field, there was nothing unique about the horror of what Mrs Yates did. "Infanticide is far more common than people are willing to accept," said Larry Milner, a Chicago area doctor, author of an exhaustive history of child killing down the ages and founder of the Society to Prevent Infanticide. "There is a social taboo in place preventing people from looking at the issue as any more than a string of isolated incidents."

Two weeks ago, a young mother in Dania Beach, Florida, drowned her seven-month-old daughter and immediately shot herself dead. Last week, two six-week-old twins were found dead in Orange, Texas, and police have not ruled out the possibility of foul play by the parents. And this week a woman and her three children were found asphyxiated in the family garage in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

According to Dr Milner, child killings account for more than 3 per cent of all murders in the US. As many as half of all pregnancies in the US are unwanted, he estimates; even after accounting for abortion, which cuts the number in half again, that still leaves more than a million children a year who run the risk of rejection or worse.

It is commonly assumed that a mother who kills her children must be suffering some kind of psychotic episode connected to post-partum depression. According to Dr Milner, that is not always the case: "That's usually the reason when the mother kills herself afterwards. But in cases like this one, where the mother does not kill herself, the literature shows that revenge against the spouse is the most common cause."

Many media commentators have noted how rationally both Mrs Yates and her husband behaved after the catastrophe. Mrs Yates first called the police, and then phoned her husband – telling him he had to come home. "That does not strike me as being consistent with a psychotic episode," Dr Milner said.

Knowledge of the Yates' circumstances is still incomplete. We know she suffered severe post-partum depression after the birth of her fourth and fifth children, and was on a heavy regime of anti-depressants and anti-psychotic drugs. We also know that she looked after all five children without help and home-schooled them.

The testimony of some friends and neighbours suggests Mrs Yates, a trained nurse who gave up her career for her family, may not have been as heavily into the family's evangelical brand of Christianity as her husband. Home schooling and large families are often encouraged by churches, irrespective of the financial and psychological toll that such a lifestyle can take on the mother.

One former school friend of Mrs Yates', Kelly Young, told the Houston Chronicle newspaper: "I would never in a million years have expected her to have five children. She never made any indication that she was really interested in having many kids."

Dr Milner estimates that around 10 per cent of all children ever born have been killed by their parents. In developed countries like the US, it is far less common but would probably be more prevalent, he argues, without child welfare services and the intervention of paediatricians and other health professionals. "In Western societies, infanticide is often an extreme form of child abuse. And it is often reported as an accident, not a crime," he said.

One instance of child abuse came to light in a Dallas courtroom this week, where police said 8-year-old Lauren Calhoun was kept locked in a cupboard for four years and systematically malnourished. Her parents told her five siblings to deny her existence.

* Internet auction site eBay has halted an auction of a website address for Mrs Yates. Bidding had reached $752,011 (£530,00). AndreaPiaYates.com started bids at $500,000 (£352,000) on Tuesday and solicited six offers before eBay closed the bidding.Kevin Pursglove, spokesman for eBay, told the Houston Chronicle (in yesterday's edition) the auction violated eBay's policy, which prohibits sales of "murderabilia" or things associated with killers and notorious crimes. Such auctions have been banned by eBay since 17 May.