A candle for babies who died in French house of horrors

THE priest lit candles and asked for prayers for the eight little babies whose lives were ended by the mother soon after she had brought each of them into the world.

Dominique Cottrez should not be judged, he told the congregation in the French village where the 45-year-old woman had spent all her life.

Instead they should leave the judicial authorities to do their job, and entrust the lives of the eight non baptised children to the mercy of God.

Infanticide is a little known crime in an age where children are cherished, where parents spend their lives working to give them the best of everything.

So now all eyes are on France as this is not the first case of parents killing their newborn babies, but the 12th discovered in the past 26 years.

In all the cases there were several babies involved and in some of the cases the father did the killing or colluded with his wife in the murder and disposal of the bodies.

In one case the remains of five newborns were discovered in rubbish sacks in a forest. Their parents were never found but the babies were all born to the same mother.

In three cases the bodies were discovered in freezers and in another case six little bodies were found in the cellar. In several more they were buried in the garden of their parents’ home.

Most victims appeared to have been suffocated or strangled very soon after being born. Most cases were in small towns and villages where nobody appeared to have noticed anything.

Media have been asking what turns mothers into murderers, and there are plenty of psychiatrists and psychologists with a variety of answers. In some cases mothers deny their pregnancies and hardly remember getting rid of the evidence, seems to be the favourite explanation.

But the prosecutor in the latest case said that the care worker did not deny her pregnancies and explained how she was able to hide her condition because of her weight. He added this was an important admittance when it comes to the court case.

But it begs the question whether infanticide is a crime or an illness. In all the French cases of the last few years, the mother and frequently the father too were jailed.

One could ask “why France?”. Doubtless this crime is not unique to France. Neither is it a modern day phenomenon. In times gone it was not unusual to see the bodies of newborn babies floating in the rivers of big cities.

But in this age when contraception – and even abortion – is easily available in most countries, infanticide is a strange answer to an unwanted pregnancy.

The priest at Mass pointed out that the babies were not baptised – and so in the teaching of the Catholic Church barred from Heaven. The same church disapproves of contraception and leaves many women with the choice of committing the sin of preventing pregnancy or killing the consequence.

The region of Douai, where the Cottrez family lived, has a long history as a centre of Catholicism and its university was where the Irish, Scottish and British Catholics came for education.

Like most of rural France, its Catholic roots run deep leaving societies quite conservative, especially on matters like contraception. Not just in France of course. The Church teaching creates strange conflicts. For instance the abortion rate is higher in the Catholic south of the Netherlands than in the Protestant north, where the attitude is more open.

It would be good if the religious and the judiciary could work to understand why a mother could take the life of her child and then act to eliminate the reasons where possible, differentiating between pregnancy prevention and murder.