"Canada's Most Notorious Bad Mother": the newspaper coverage of the Jordan Heikamp Inquest

This article is an examination of the media coverage of the inquest into the 1997 starvation death of an infant in a homeless women's shelter in Toronto. It explores the usefulness of using the discourse of mothering, intersected with the individualization of responsibility, to understand why one interpretation of this case seized the imagination of the public and informed media accounts. Examining how the mother of this infant was constructed as a "bad" mother helps to understand how hegemonic notions of "good" mothering are reinforced and perpetuated. The invocation of the ideals of motherhood, however, prevents us from seeing the reality of others' experiences of motherhood and the fact that, for many, there are barriers and restrictions to the ideal of good mothering.