The smile of a child barely one year old lit up the screen of her cell phone. His first brown hair was in a mess, and he had an alert and amused expression as he held a musical book in his hands. Then other, more recent images: The little boy wearing red and white pajamas in Christmas colors, a doll in his mouth. In the next one, he is playing on a mat. Laughing, there too. "I have never seen my son in real life since then," said Thelma, 18 years old, as she scrolled through the photos she had received on her phone, in front of her lawyer, Amina Saadaoui. (Thelma's first name has been changed, as have those of all the people mentioned in this article by first name only.)

Since then? Since the morning of October 20, 2023, when the teenager gave birth to her newborn baby alone in her bedroom. She wrapped him in a towel, placed him in a shopping bag from the "Everything for two euros" chain and then in a garbage bag. Sealing the second plastic layer, she walked downstairs to her gray-fronted apartment building in the south of Rennes, where she lived. She threw her baby into the adjoining garbage dumpster – a green ledge with a large metal opening overlooking a 2.5-meter-deep underground container.

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