Although infanticide occurs everywhere and at all levels of society, France seems to have been especially afflicted in the past three decades. 
 
 The most notorious case in recent years is that of Vï¿½ronique Courjault, now 41, jailed in Tours last year after admitting murdering three babies and keeping their bodies in the family freezer. 
 
 In November 1984, Jean-Pierre Leymarie and his wife Rolande were jailed for killing seven newborns in Corrèze. Four years later, Rosita Garnier, 38, was jailed by a court in Blois for murdering three newborns. 
 
 Sylvie Coulon, 27, from Limoges, was jailed in 1990 for killing four infants and putting their bodies out with the rubbish. And Cï¿½line Lesage, 34, admitted the murder of seven babies found in a cellar in Normandy in 2007. 
 
 "It's easy to come up with a narrative to explain why it happens in contemporary India or 17th-century Europe, for example, but why is it happening in 21st-century France?" asks Michelle Oberman, author of When Mothers Kill. 
 
 The recent French cases also deviate sharply from the pattern in the US, she said, where the mother is usually very young, not in a relationship and who conceals the pregnancy from her parents, and then kills the child as soon as it is born. 
 
 One of the conditions often offered up to explain infanticide is "pregnancy denial", a psychiatric condition where a woman either doesn't realise or cannot accept she's having a baby, not even enough to consider an abortion. 
 
 "Women can carry on menstruating, they don't put on weight and their breasts don't get bigger because the denial is so strong it overcomes the physical manifestations of pregnancy," explained Anne Carpenter, a consultant forensic clinical psychologist in Glasgow. When the baby arrives, she is forced to confront that reality, and sometimes with catastrophic results. 
 
 "With no sense of the child as an individual being, it is viewed more as an inconvenience, and something to be got rid of in the same way as you get rid of the trash," she added. 
 
 But denial is not the only explanation. Pierre Lamothe, a French psychiatrist, said in many cases he had studied, the women wanted to be pregnant because it made them feel fully feminine, but they did not want children. "When the child appears, it has no real existence," he said. "Mentally, the woman does not accept that it is a living person." ||||| A French woman has gone on trial for premeditated murder after leaving her 15-month old daughter to die on a beach in Northern France. 
 
 Fabienne Kabou, 39, admitted leaving her only child – named Adélaïde after her grandmother - in freezing conditions on the Berck-sur-Mer beach as the tide came in during a hearing following the incident in November 2013. 
 
 Ms Kabou is said to have taken a train from Paris to the Channel coast, and on arrival had allegedly asked locals about tide times, Le Monde reported. 
 
 On the same evening she is accused of taking the girl to the beach – which she allegedly told detectives she chose because “even the name sounded sad” – and returning without her. A fisherman discovered the child's body the following morning. 
 
 Although Ms Kabou admitted to leaving the girl shortly after she was arrested, subsequent psychiatric analysis said the defendant had "severely impaired judgement due to paranoid delusions", Le Figaro reported. 
 
 However, psychiatrists found the woman was not clinically insane, so a trial is being held to decide the woman's guilt. 
 
 During a hearing at the Boulogne-sur-Mer court on 23 December 2013, Ms Kabou described how she had felt driven by a relentless force, according to Le Parisien. 
 
 She explained: “I'm still standing, I hold her against me and then I say ‘no, no, no’, I keep saying no, I do not know why. I cried. It’s as if I was telling someone I could not do a thing like that, but I did.” 
 
 Ms Kabou was previously living in a Paris workshop with sculptor Michael Lafon, who was 30 years her senior and the father to her child. 
 
 She had become pregnant twice before – both times suffering miscarriages – and gave birth to the third child alone in the workshop. 
 
 Mental Health Awareness: Facts and figures 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 10 show all Mental Health Awareness: Facts and figures 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report 30 per cent of people deal with anxiety by talking to a friend or relative, or by going for a walk. Getty 
 
 2/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report Almost one in five people feel anxious all or a lot of the time. PA 
 
 3/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report 22 per cent of women feel anxious a lot or all of the time, compared to 15 per cent of men. Roman Levin/Flickr Creative Commons 
 
 4/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report 45 per cent of people who feel anxious in everyday life cite financial issues as their biggest cause of worry. Getty 
 
 5/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report And 26 per cent of people who feel anxious say fearing for the welfare of their children and loved ones leaves them burdened with worry. And 26 per cent of people say fearing for the welfare of their children and loved ones leaves them burdened with anxiety. 
 
 6/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report 27 per cent of people who suffer from anxiety say work issues, such as long hours, are the source of the problem. Getty 
 
 7/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report But 16 per cent use alcohol to cope, while 10 per cent turn to cigarettes in the face of anxiety. Unemployed people are more likely to resort to these harmful strategies: 27 per cent use alcohol and 23 per cent use cigarettes. AFP/Getty 
 
 8/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report Only seven per cent of people who say they suffer from anxiety seek help from their GP. Getty 
 
 9/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report People are thought to be more anxious than they were five years ago. Alessandra/Flickr Creative Commons 
 
 10/10 Mental Health Foundation: Living With Anxiety report The stresses of modern life are thought to have created "The Age of Anxiety". Getty 
 
 The pair had never registered the birth of the girl, so officially she did not exist. According to three experts on the case this was because the woman believed her daughter to be in great danger. 
 
 Drs Daniel Zagury, Roland Coutanceau and Mourassis Wilquin examined the woman – who was born to a wealthy Catholic family in Dakar, Senegal - and found she had “great intelligence” and “an IQ well above average”. 
 
 However, they were also said to be struck by the faith she placed in irrational beliefs such as witchcraft, according to Le Monde. 
 
 Ms Kabou reportedly felt ill and often had hallucinations, which she had documented in a journal. She also wrote how she could hear the voices of dead relatives who she believed intended to harm her, the newspaper said. 
 
 The trial is expected to take a week and, if found guilty, Ms Kabou could recieve a life sentence.
– It's a good question. Why, asks Bruce Crumley in TIME, are French women killing their babies? It may have something to do with a little known, "quasi-schizophrenic" phenomenon called "pregnancy denial," he finds. Women with this condition "either don't realize or cannot accept that they are with child," a doctor says. And, he adds, it's not a French-only thing. Women can become "so convinced pregnancy is impossible that once the child they never wanted arrives, they don't accept it as real and get rid of it," the doctor says. Or, as one psychologist tells the Independent, for some women a baby "is viewed more as an inconvenience, and something to be got rid of in the same way as you get rid of the trash."