A woman who killed eight of her babies has gone on trial in northern France after the killings were discovered back in 2010.

The trial of Dominique Cottrez began on Thursday and is expected to last one week, according to French media.

The jury must decide if Cottrez is guilty of multiple infanticide or acquit her because of her alleged troubled mental state.

She confessed five years ago to suffocating her children after giving birth secretly at home in Lille, France.

The 51-year-old former nursing assistant had previously stated that she had a long incestuous relationship with her father and she feared that the babies might be his.

But after forensic investigations were done, it was proven that the babies were fathered by her husband, and not her father.

If found guilty, Cottrez could spend the rest of her life behind bars.

During her trial she was crying and told investigators that she did not know she was pregnant because her obesity appeared to hide the pregnancies.

She cited that her pregnancies went unnoticed by her husband, children, neighbors, colleagues, and even doctors at a nearby hospital where she worked.

She has told the court that for most of her life she was mocked for being overweight by others. As a result, her lawyers claim, she closed herself up at the family farm with her father.

"She was held prisoner by incest. She was convinced she was going to have monsters and that these monsters had no identity, no reality," one of her lawyers said.

After she killed the babies, who were born between 1989 and 2006, she buried them in the garden of her home and her parents' home in a nearby town not far away from where she lived.

The bodies were discovered in 2010 when a man was digging the garden. The case is considered the worst infanticide case in modern French history.

HDS/MHB/SS