Veronique Courjault and Her Frozen Babies: Of Course She Knew

They've been calling it "l'affaire des bébés congelés" -- the case of the frozen babies.

A 41-year-old French woman, Veronique Courjault, was sentenced Thursday to a mind-boggling eight and a half years in prison for murdering three of her five children. Courjault claims that in 1999, 2002, and 2003 she "was conscious of being pregnant, but not of being pregnant with babies." During her trial in January, she confessed that this sounded "absurd." Yeaaah, that's the word I'd use. She burned one of her infants and locked the other two in a freezer because her body "blocked the preganancies" and "no relationship with the babies developed." Apparently Courjault suffers from "pregnancy denial," a condition that's been documented on TLC's "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant."

Mr. Courjault, who never knew his wife was pregnant and discovered the bodies of the frozen infants while she was away with the couple's two teenaged sons, has said that he has "no doubt about Veronique's potential as a wife and as a mother. We must free that potential." Marie-Pierre Courtellemont, a French journalist who wrote a book on the Courjault trial, echoed his sentiments -- sort of. "It helped that the public could relate. Infanticides were usually associated with poor backgrounds and teen pregnancy. But there you had a middle-class, bourgeois family, educated people. It made people think, 'This could be me.'"

For me here's where this whole thing got really crazy. This could be me? Really? No, this could be a criminally insane nutbag of a "mother" who despite living in a country where abortion has been legal since the 70s decided on murder instead. I don't like saying the word "murder" in conjunction with women and babies, especially in a climate where murder and choice are being confused. But what Courjault did was murder. See, the "frozen babies" case makes me, an abortion rights proponent (it's always P.C. here at P.D.), a little nuts. Actually, it drives me crazy when grown women with access to choice choose so badly.