Claire Soares: The denial that can drive women to infanticide

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 Véronique 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 Céline 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."