18 YEAR OLD KEPT DEAD BABY’S CORPSE FULLY DRESSED IN HER HOME (TRINIDAD)

READERS have recoiled in shock and horror to the story coming out of La Brea that a teenage mother kept her dead baby, fully dressed, in the bedroom for eight months before police discovered it.

But Dr. Varma Deyalsingh, secretary of the Association of Psychiatrists, said it was not strange that a woman would want to keep her dead baby.

What was bizarre, he said, was why the young woman’s relatives accepted her decision and refused to contact the authorities.

Deyalsingh was responding to the discovery of skeletal remains of an infant on a bed at a house in La Brea on Thursday. The baby was delivered by an 18-year-old girl in February and was last seen alive in March.

Deyalsingh said there were instances which would lead to a mother wanting to keep her dead baby close. He said the woman may have been too attached to the child.

“She may not even recognise the baby is dead in her own mind. Let us say she is psychotic and she thinks the baby is just asleep. She may not recognise that, she may want to hold on to that baby. She may want that attachment, she may think that the baby would still come alive, so she may have that delusion,” he said.

In another instance, Deyalsingh said, a mother may not contact the authorities if the baby was harmed. “Another instance could be if she feels that she harmed the baby intentionally and she is scared,” he said.

Deyalsingh said the teenager’s relatives should have contacted the authorities, if they were fully aware of what was happening.

“If you have a baby that is not crying, something is wrong. If there is the smell of a decaying corpse then something is wrong,” he said.

2,500 teen pregnancies annually

Deyalsingh said in Trinidad and Tobago there were approximately 2,500 teenage pregnancies annually.

He said teenagers did not have adequate parenting techniques and it was expected that they would be supported by family members. He said it had become necessary for district nurses to visit the homes of newborn babies regularly.

“People may not come to clinic and relatives are not aware of the dangers. We need a situation where district visiting nurses and social workers should be like a new army that should go and visit, looking at the well-being of the baby, the mother, the house, the environment in which the child lives. Every health centre should visit these homes with new born babies,” he said.