Pascal Rossignol / Reuters Candles are displayed in front of the house where the bodies of newborn babies were found in Villers-au-Tertre, France, on July 29, 2010 
 
 The question is as horrifying as it is important to ask: Why are a rising number of French women killing their newborn babies? Finding the answer has become a matter of urgency following the discovery on Wednesday of eight infants allegedly smothered to death and buried by their mother in northern France. And with that case marking at least the fifth instance of multiple infanticide reported in France since 2003, it has become vital for the nation to confront the phenomenon that appears to be behind it all: a mental condition known as pregnancy denial. 
 
 This latest case of newborn murder in France was uncovered in the northern town of Villiers-au-Tertre, after eight tiny bodies were found buried in the gardens of two separate homes. Six of the cadavers were unearthed on July 29 by police at the house of Dominique Cottrez, 45, and her husband Pierre-Marie, 47. Investigators searched their home after the resident of a house previously owned by Dominique's parents turned up two tiny bodies on July 24 while digging a pool in the backyard. According to the French prosecutor leading the inquiry in the town, a short distance south of Lille, Dominique has admitted to hiding her pregnancies  and the killings of her babies  from her husband, whom police describe as being "dumbstruck" by the revelations. Dominique was charged for the murders; Pierre-Marie has been cleared of wrongdoing and released but could yet become a subject of investigation. (See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.) 
 
 The case in Villiers-au-Tertre is only the most recent example of a father of slain babies being apparently unaware of his wife's pregnancies. Four other such cases since 2003 include that of Véronique Courjault, 42, who was convicted in June 2009 of killing three of her newborns  two of whom she hid in a freezer and were later discovered by her husband. 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. Both women were sentenced to prison  Courjault for eight years and Lesage for 15. 
 
 Experts explained those cases as resulting from pregnancy denial, an often misunderstood and minimized condition. 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. Whether these women are afflicted with the condition before they deliver or as they're suddenly giving birth, Delcroix explains, the psychological denial is so strong that they refuse to believe they're pregnant even when the reality confronts them. (See more on pregnancy.) 
 
 "These women are 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 to restore order to what they believe is nonpregnant reality," Delcroix says. "However terrible its consequences, pregnancy denial acts in infanticide cases much as a psychotic state that drives someone to kill another person does. Yet we still try women for what they do during pregnancy denial when we don't try psychotic killers deemed not responsible for their actions." Delcroix and others who are fighting for pregnancy denial to be medically and legally recognized as an illness argue that improving ways to identify and treat these women makes more sense than simply punishing the crimes they commit as a result of it. 
 
 What causes the condition? Several things, Delcroix says, including previous trauma such as beatings and rape. 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. And while pregnancy denial has been around for decades or longer, Delcroix says it's rising in frequency. The probable reason, he says, is changes in wider social factors that have downgraded the value of childhood, parenting and family. 
 
 But in some cases, it can also be a matter of women simply failing to see themselves as mothers. "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. "When the child arrives, it doesn't really exist for them. They don't give it life, in psychological terms. If they saw it as a [real] baby, they wouldn't kill it." (See the top 25 crimes of the past century.) 
 
 Others just never realize  or acknowledge  that they're with child. Experts on pregnancy denial say most sufferers are either sufficiently overweight or experience such little body change that they simply assume they've gained some weight. In France, 230 women a year discover their pregnancy only while giving birth. Though just a fraction resort to infanticide, Delcroix fears there are more of those cases that remain undiscovered than there are ones that come to light, as in Villiers-au-Tertre. And he poses a chilling question: Does anyone really believe that the spreading phenomenon of pregnancy denial  and the infanticide it can lead to  is purely a French problem? ||||| 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." ||||| Ultrasound at 12 Weeks 
 
 Blogs | Aug. 12, 2011 
 
 What Pro-Choice Intellectual Honesty Looks Like 
 
 I hope that everyone who is pro-choice reads this article from Wednesday’s New York Times, because it highlights a seldom-discussed side of the abortion debate: When women abort some of their children after conceiving multiple babies through reproductive technology. 
 
 The article starts with the story of a woman named Jenny, who is choosing to “reduce” her twins pregnancy to one child at 14 weeks gestation. (It’s worth noting that babies at that age can clench their fists and exercise their facial muscles. Their genitals have fully formed and their livers have begun to produce bile.) After noting that Jenny did not want to watch the abortion occur on the overhead ultrasound screen, the author writes: 
 
 She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment—and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt. “Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn’t had children already or if we were more financially secure,” she said later. “If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.” 
 
 It reminds me of a 2004 piece, also in the Times, where a women name Amy Richards talked about aborting two of her children after she’d naturally conceived triplets, mainly because she didn’t want the lifestyle changes that would come with three children: 
 
 My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, Do I want to? I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ‘‘Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?’’ The obstetrician wasn’t an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more. 
 
 Here’s the weird part: Some pro-choice people are uncomfortable with this kind of thing. 
 
 The article from this week noted that many doctors who perform these “selective reductions” refuse to go below twins. Dr. Mark Evans, a doctor who help pioneer the procedure and still performs these kind of abortions, once spoke out against reductions to fewer than two children. However, he recently reversed his stance since many of his clients are in their 40s: 
 
 Evans understood why these women didn’t want to be in their 60s worrying about two tempestuous teenagers or two college-tuition bills. He noted that many of the women were in second marriages, and while they wanted to create a child with their new spouse, they did not want two, especially if they had children from a previous marriage. 
 
 But not everyone is able to get as comfortable with it as Evans has. When a woman posted on an internet forum that she aborted her son in a male-female twins pregnancy because she already had a son, one commenter responded, undoubtedly speaking for many: 
 
 I completely respect and support a woman’s choice. Something about that whole situation just seemed unethical to me. I just couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I terminated my daughter’s perfectly healthy twin brother. 
 
 When another selective reduction pioneering doctor asked his staff what they thought of twins-to-singleton procedures, “every one of them—the sonographer, the genetic counselors, the schedulers—supported abortion rights, but all confessed their growing unease with reductions to a singleton.” 
 
 What’s there to be uneasy about? The entire pro-choice position rests on the idea that these “fetuses” are not human beings; they’re merely clumps of tissue, with no rights of their own. To use Planned Parenthood’s words, here is how they explain to women what happens during an abortion: 
 
 A tube is inserted through the cervix into the uterus. Either a hand-held suction device or a suction machine gently empties your uterus. Sometimes, an instrument called a curette is used to remove any remaining tissue that lines the uterus. It may also be used to check that the uterus is empty. 
 
 An abortion is merely a process of “emptying the uterus” of “tissue”—so what’s the big deal if there are multiple pieces of tissue and the doctor only eliminates one? According to the tenets of the pro-choice position, this should be completely fine. 
 
 I am thankful that Jenny and Amy Richards shared their stories. As hard as it is to read about what they did, I don’t think they deserve special condemnation for their actions. They were merely following the pro-choice worldview to its logical conclusions. And if others who share their views are uncomfortable with it, I hope they’ll do some soul searching about why it bothers them. 
 
 I realize that almost everyone who supports abortion does so out of good intentions; all the pro-choice people I know are compassionate folks who are trying to do the right thing. But, as I’ve said before, I think that their misguided compassion leads them to overlook some critical facts, and that this is brought into relief when you really think through all the implications of saying that life in the womb is not human. I hope they read those articles linked above, and listen to the stories of women going to abortion specialists and choosing sons over daughters, letting lifestyle considerations lead them to reduce three heartbeats on a screen to one. Because that is what pro-choice intellectual honesty looks like.
– 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."