And this past March, Céline Lesage, 38, was found guilty of murdering six of her babies after she hid her pregnancies from the men who had fathered them. 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. According to Michel Delcroix, a former gynecologist who served as a court expert in the Courjault trial and others involving pregnancy issues, pregnancy denial is a quasi-schizophrenic condition in which women either don't realize or cannot accept that they are with child  not even enough to have an abortion. "However terrible its consequences, pregnancy denial acts in infanticide cases much as a psychotic state that drives someone to kill another person does. But other, nonphysical factors can also be involved, and denial can kick in even if a woman has already had and raised children without a problem  Lesage has a 14-year-old son; Dominique Cottrez has two grown daughters. "Some women never manage to update their self-identity during pregnancy, [while others] want to become pregnant without wanting to procreate," psychiatrist Pierre Lamothe told Le Parisien on Thursday.
– 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."