Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory adds to the debate - recently covered on WVON, here and here - following the case of Dominique Cottrez this week, who has admitted to killing eight of her newborn babies. Tracy argues that women suffering from the condition of 'pregnancy denial' (which I confess to having never heard of before this week) should be treated for this little known mental health condition, rather than prosecuted as criminals:
"However terrible its consequences," writes former gynaecologist and expert witness in similar cases to Cottrez, Michel Delcroix, " 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."
Pregnancy denial takes three main forms, the article posits:
"pervasive denial (where a woman is both emotionally and intellectually unaware of the pregnancy), affective denial (she's intellectually aware but emotionally in denial) and psychotic denial. The latter is what experts suggest in Cottrez's case."
Regardless of whether pregnancy denial is formally recognised as a form of psychological illness, this story is bound to generate a lot of controversy, both within the feminist movement and beyond.
