On February 8, 1785, the Gazeta de Mxico, one of New Spain's first news periodicals, published an announcement from the city of Guanajuato celebrating the recent birth of a pair of conjoined twins:Doa Rafaela Corts has delivered two children from one birth, joined together at the back of their heads by the skull. They received the holy waters of baptism and were christened Joseph Nepomuceno Guadalupe and Joseph Ignacio Guadalupe Many people, admiring these rare effects of nature, have visited them, and there has been no record in these twins of any deformity or defect in their separate and agile bodies The few doctors and surgeons residing in the city have considered separating them, but have not found it advisable because of the manner in which they are united, and every day more news circulates about their existence and longevity, causing ever more admiration for them given that the first one was born foot-first, and in delivering him, the midwife discovered the knot that joined the two heads.

On February 8, 1785, theGazeta de México, one of New Spain's first news periodicals, published an announcement from the city of Guanajuato celebrating the recent birth of a pair of conjoined twins:Doña Rafaela Cortés … has delivered two children from one birth, joined together at the back of their heads by the skull. They received the holy waters of baptism and were christened Joseph Nepomuceno Guadalupe and Joseph Ignacio Guadalupe… Many people, admiring these rare effects of nature, have visited them, and there has been no record in these twins of any deformity or defect in their separate and agile bodies… The few doctors and surgeons residing in the city have considered separating them, but have not found it advisable because of the manner in which they are united, and every day more news circulates about their existence and longevity, causing ever more admiration for them given that the first one was born foot-first, and in delivering him, the midwife discovered the knot that joined the two heads.

Colonial authorities prosecuted surprisingly few women for the crimes of abortion and infanticide in viceregal Mexico. Although criminal courts tried hundreds of such cases in the nineteenth century, only a handful of trials survive from Mexico's colonial era. This article examines criminal and inquisition records, jurisprudence, and medical texts to try to explain this discrepancy. The available evidence suggests that women in colonial Mexico did commit infanticide and abortion much more frequently than the surviving documentary record implies but that neither their peers nor courts viewed the crimes as harshly as they would in later periods. Women successfully concealed the crimes, the public declined to view these acts as criminal, and criminal courts treated them with leniency. Justices, members of the public, and mothers themselves privileged other factors, particularly fiscal concerns and the maintenance of codes of female honor, above a concern with the crimes of infanticide and abortion.In July 1806, Mariana del Carmen Ventura, a prostitute of Spanish descent, stood accused of infanticide before the local criminal court in the town of Zacualtiplan de la Sierra in the present-day state of Hidalgo, Mexico. Having been denounced by a municipal official, Ventura revealed that since she had separated from her husband several years earlier, she had given birth to three children all of whom had died immediately after birth. In the most recent instance, she explained that two months earlier, she had given birth to a boy, in the middle of the night, when she was alone without a midwife or any other person except my legitimate son Pedro. The child was born alive, but demonstrating that he was about to die (haviendo advertido que querı´a morir), she took a mouthful of water and blew it into in his mouth, saying ''In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,'' and then he died. The only one who saw this was her son

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The criminal trials of twenty-seven women processed for the crimes of abortion and infanticide in the state of Puebla, Mexico during the nineteenth century reveal both community and state perspectives about contemporary notions of gender, motherhood, and honor. This paper argues that while there was an increase in both denunciations and convictions for these crimes in the nineteenth century, women's peers acted as reluctant participants in their incrimination. Both local and higher court justices convicted women more frequently for abortion and infanticide than they had done in the colonial era, but nonetheless sentenced them with considerable leniency. Some of the explanation for their leniency lay in court officials' view that indigenous women, who constituted a considerable percentage of the defendants, were too “rustic” or “ignorant” to be held responsible for their actions. The cases also reveal, however, that courts and communities shared the view that any means–including committing violent crimes or hiding pregnancies–justified the ends of protecting plebeian women's reputation of sexual honor.