Global Arab Network | France - The Other Side of Motherhood

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France - The Other Side of Motherhood

Global Arab Network - - Maha Karim

Saturday, 27 June 2009 21:57

In France this week, Véronique Courjault was convicted of killing three of her babies. She had burned one of the infants and stored the other two in the freezer.
It’s a horrifying tale, which has quite understandably shocked the nation, not least because the woman was a middle-class exemplary mother of two.

The case has brought to light the phenomenon of pregnancy denial. It seems unthinkable, unimaginable even, but it is the case that thousands of women every year give birth without even suspecting that they had been pregnant. In a minority of cases, the child is killed at birth. Not knowing she was pregnant, the woman does not understand that she has given birth to a child. As Courjault tried to explain to the court: she had never felt the babies move, she did not think of them as alive, in fact she did not see them as babies at all.

Courjault was found guilty and has been sentenced to eight years in jail. Reading all the coverage of the case I am struck by two things. The first is how initial feelings of hatred and repulsion towards Courjault were replaced by a quest to understand. Be it the press, her family, her lawyers or even the state prosecutor, there has been a genuine attempt to understand what could make a woman kill her own children and to view her actions from her point of view.

The second is how this case has put the spotlight not just on the phenomenon of pregnancy denial, but on motherhood itself. There is an almost mythical attachment to perfect motherhood. Women are expected to know how to be mothers. The maternal instinct is taken as a given, something that is part and parcel of being female and any woman, who for some reason or other does not manage to fulfill the societal role of the loving mother is judged harshly for it.

Courjault’s case is an extreme example, let us not dwell on mothers who kill their babies, it is thankfully a rare phenomenon. However, pregnancy denial is not so rare.

I have a friend who works at a maternity unit in a large hospital. She tells me that just last week a woman showed up at the ER with stomach cramps thinking she must have a bad case of food poisoning. She was stunned to find out that she was nine months pregnant and in labour. Imagine her shock at finding herself with a baby in her arms when she had not even suspected she could be pregnant! But how? How can it possibly be? Surely your periods stop, your belly grows, you feel sick, tired and crave weird foods, pregnancy has symptoms, very visible symptoms. And even if a woman is in denial, how could her husband, her colleagues, her friends not notice a nine months bump?

And this is where it gets really interesting, because if your mind does not accept that you are pregnant, your body does not behave as if you are pregnant. Women will typically continue to have periods, they will take on no more than one or two kilos, their belly will stay the same. The baby even grows in a different position, staying vertical instead of adopting the foetal position and sitting high up in the uterus so that it can grow without the need for a baby bump. My friend sees five or six such pregnancies in her service every year. There are no outward signs of pregnancy and none, not even the woman’s family doctor, suspects she is pregnant. And five times out of ten, the woman will already have had children and will have experienced perfectly normal pregnancies in the past. It is not a form of ignorance or poor education, the woman genuinely has no idea she is pregnant. She may even have continued to take the contraceptive pill not knowing that she could be pregnant.

Sometimes pregnancy is detected late, often at around five months. What is amazing is that the moment a woman finds out she is pregnant, her belly will start to grow and she will quickly take on the regular aspect of a pregnant woman.

What is it that causes pregnancy denial? That is a question that lacks a satisfactory answer. Some psychological process must take place, which blocks the idea of pregnancy. In some cases the couple already have children and do not want any more. In others there may be a childhood trauma, which blocks the woman from conceiving of herself as pregnant. The truth is nobody knows, but it could happen to almost anyone.

We may think of motherhood as a blessed state, as something so natural that women do it, instinctively and without difficulty, but reality is often far from this perfection. Véronique Courjault’s case is extreme and has been shocking not only because we find it inconceivable that a mother could kill her own children, but also because a woman who is a good mother to two children could go on to do this. It is an attack on our very idea of motherhood.

Motherhood is a blessing. For most women it is a dream come true. But often it is followed by a hard wake-up call. Being a mother is wonderful and a source of joy, but it is also hard and relentless. Some simply do not cope with the reality. Women are under tremendous pressure to be perfect mothers. Is it any wonder that this pressure sometimes leads women to breaking point?

Global Arab Network

Iman Kurdi is an Arab writer based in London. She can be reached at ik511@ hotmail.com - First published in Khaleejtimes.

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