Woman admits to bleeding infant daughter

CINCINNATI, May 24 (UPI) -- An Indiana mother has admitted to purposely taking blood from her 9-month-old daughter to gain attention for herself, prosecutors say.

Doctors were baffled last year as to why the infant, Sophia Lewis of Milan, Ind., was losing so much blood. But physicians at Cincinnati Children's Hospital said they determined that her mother, Kellie Lewis, was bleeding the infant purposely. Last week Lewis pleaded guilty to felonious assault and two counts of child endangering, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

Hamilton County, Ohio, prosecutors accused Lewis of "removing blood from her child, thereby causing the child to suffer blood loss requiring multiple transfusions with attendant risk."

Lewis maintains she suffers from a rare psychological disorder called Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, in which mothers fake illnesses of their children or sometimes inflict real physical abuse on them, often to get sympathy for or draw attention to the themselves, the newspaper said.

"They appear to be extremely attentive mothers … even though they know the whole time they are causing it," Brian Masterson, a University of Cincinnati professor of clinical psychiatry, told the Enquirer. "We do know people do this. Nobody has any idea why."