Not guilty?

Psychiatrists can explain why someone would murder a pregnant woman, cut the baby out of the womb, and adopt the baby as her own.

[Lisa M. ] Montgomery, news reports said, showed off the baby proudly, as if nothing were wrong. This almost certainly reflects delusional thinking, psychiatrists said.



Psychosis may give rise to elaborate narrative fantasies of good and evil and voices commanding some action. The criminal complaint said Ms. Montgomery found her victim over the Internet, where a picture of the pregnant woman could have prompted any number of thoughts and plots, forensic psychiatrists say.



"In these cases a woman might have a delusion that that's my baby in that woman, she's stolen it, and if I don't rescue it she's going to kill it, and the motivation is so overwhelming that you just lose contact with reality," said Dr. Jack M. Gorman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "It's hard for people who've never had this kind of experience to understand, but the voices and hallucinations and demands become overwhelming."