Behavior: Why Mothers Kill Their Babies

It is a bizarre and frightening deed, one that elicits an almost primal horror: an apparently normal mother suddenly snaps and kills her newborn child. Sadly, it is not all that rare. In April, according to police, Lucrezia Gentile, a Brooklyn housewife, reported that her two-month-old son had been abducted, then confessed that she had drowned him in his bath. Reason: she could not stand his incessant crying. A year earlier, Michele Remington, a factory worker in Bennington, Vt., fatally shot her infant son with a .22-cal. handgun before unsuccessfully trying to kill herself. Kathleen Householder, of Rippon, W. Va., hit her two-week-old daughter in the head with a fist-size rock because she was "fussing"; Householder dumped the tiny body in a nearby river.

The doleful litany goes on and on. What can possibly explain such horrific acts? Increasingly, doctors and psychiatrists are pointing to temporary mental breakdown in the months after giving birth, postpartum disorders that can range from mild depression to full-blown psychosis. Medical experts have long known that though the year after the birth of a child may be one of the most joyful times in a woman's life, it is also among the most stressful. Between 50% and 80% of new mothers experience an emotional letdown, known as the "baby blues," and become sensitive, moody and tearful. Such feelings usually disappear within a couple of weeks.

However, about 8% to 12% of women who give birth suffer a blacker torment and become seriously depressed for months. They undergo mercurial mood swings, lose their appetite and go sleepless for nights on end. Plagued by thoughts of ; suicide or fantasies of killing their baby by dropping it down the stairs, burying it in the backyard or cutting it up with a kitchen knife. "These are invasive, terrifying ideas that can drive them crazy," says Psychiatrist Ricardo Fernandez, of Princeton, N.J. "A lot of women have a tremendous amount of guilt and shame because of these thoughts."

Most never act on the dark impulses, but a few new mothers -- less than 1% -- become psychotic. These may suffer extreme agitation, feel persecuted and begin hallucinating. Angela Thompson of Sacramento drowned her nine-month-old son in the bathtub after hearing the voice of God tell her the child was the devil. It has been five years since her son's death, but her recollection of her mental state is still vivid. "I thought if I killed the baby that my husband would raise him to life again in three days and that the world would know that my husband was Jesus Christ," she explains. "When he was dead, I thought his face was contorted like the devil's."