MOTHERS accused of killing their babies under a year old should not be prosecuted for murder, one of Britain's leading paediatric experts said yesterday.

Professor Alan Craft, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, said that mothers who killed their infants were disturbed and needed help rather than imprisonment.

He called for such women, particularly those alleged to have suffocated their babies, to be dealt with in the civil, not the criminal, courts.

Prof Craft said: "Accusing mothers of murdering their babies in the first year of life is not the right way to deal with it. They are generally mothers who need help, and locking them up for life is not the best way to help them."

The situation where "you get a longer sentence for murdering a baby, which probably you do not even know you have done, than for killing someone on the street" was "crazy" he said. He said it would be up to the Crown Prosecution Service to decide which cases should be heard in a non-adversarial, non-criminal court.

Prof Craft made his comments at a media briefing on fabricated or induced illness - formally known as Munchausen's syndrome by proxy.

In a string of high-profile cases in recent years, mothers who had been accused of murdering their babies were cleared after evidence from Professor Sir Roy Meadows, the former president of the Royal College who coined the term Munchausen syndrome by proxy, was discredited.

Prof Meadows, who has been accused of serious professional misconduct, faces a hearing by the General Medical Council next month.

Prof Craft said trials involving parents accused of killing their children required the opinion of more than one expert.

Requiring the opinion of more than one expert certainly makes sense. But aren't they opening the door ever wider for cheapening the lives of children and taking away the responsibility of the mother for the safety, comfort, and security of the child that she gave life to? If a child can't be safe and protected in the arms of it's mother, what does that say about us as a society and the world that we live in? And the same damned well applies also to the father!