Md. Researcher: Women Murdered Due To Pregnancy

WBALTV ^ | May 9, 2003 | WBAL

[ZinGirl]

Md. Researcher: Women Murdered Due To Pregnancy Some States Have 'Double Homicide' Laws When Pregnant Mothers Are Killed

BALTIMORE -- In California, Scott Peterson is preparing to go to trial for murdering his pregnant wife, Laci. It's a disturbing story, but apparently not all that unusual.

WBAL-TV 11 NEWS anchorwoman Donna Hamilton reported that the No. 1 cause of death for pregnant women has nothing do to with medicine.

Research: Homicide Kills More Pregnant Women

A fertilizer salesman, an actor and a former NFL football player have all been accused of killing their wives or girlfriends during pregnancy -- or because of it, Hamilton reported.

"We found that homicide was the leading cause of death for the pregnant women, but the fifth leading cause of death for the women who hadn't been pregnant," said Isabelle Horon, a Maryland Department of Health researcher.

Horon's study found that one in five pregnant women or new mothers who died were homicide victims. A few years ago in Boston, a 14-year-old pregnant girl was stabbed and buried alive, and police said the person responsible was her teenage boyfriend.

A decade earlier, Carol Stuart was allegedly shot to death by her husband on the way home from a birthing class.

"The most common perpetrator of homicide during pregnancy is a husband, or a boyfriend, or an ex-husband or an ex-boyfriend," said Jacquelyn Campbell, who is with the John Hopkins School of Nursing.

Campbell is a domestic violence expert who said these cases are most often the end result of ongoing violence.

"Often times, it is when she says 'I'm going to leave you' -- often times because of the abuse -- that she ends up getting killed," Campbell said.

To prevent that, several health care groups recommend screening all pregnant women for domestic violence.(my bold) But a 1999 survey found that less than one in five health providers actually do so.

Nearly two dozen states have "double homicide" laws that allow prosecutors to seek two murder convictions when a pregnant woman is killed. But those states differ on how old the fetus must be at the time of death for that second murder charge to apply.

[Mamzelle]

Hey, they're just pro-choice. They are choosing not to be fathers.

[JudgemAll]

Of course, the total devaluing of fathers, the chasing of fathers from the home, the legions of fatherless children growing up into angry adults and the endless propaganda against fathers has nothing to do with the breakdown of the family. "Women need men like fish need bicycles" and all of that.

You got that right. Fathers nowadays have been denied truly objective mediation. In the absence of mediation and the denial of God to check fathers' and mothers' sins fairly, what can we expect? Deny me my mediator and everything wrong done is your own fault. I may have regrets but I am not guilty.

[MHGinTN]

BTTT

[cpforlife.org]

What really adds to the disgust is the hypocrisy as exposed in the excerpt below from this article, which was posted by Remedy.

Constitutional Persons:An Exchange on Abortion

The common law basis of our system embodied in the principle of stare decisis and the just requirements of consistency in applying the law demand a respect for precedent. To this objection I offer two replies. First, there was a federal court precedent for the unborn person reading of Fourteenth Amendment before Roe v. Wade, though this fact was virtually ignored by Justice Harry Blackmun and the Roe Court. In Stenberg v. Brown (1970) a three-judge federal district court upheld an anti-abortion statute, stating that privacy rights "must inevitably fall in conflict with express provisions of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law." After relating the biological facts of fetal development, the court stated that "those decisions which strike down state abortion statutes by equating contraception and abortion pay no attention to the facts of biology." "Once new life has commenced," the court wrote, "the constitutional protections found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments impose upon the state the duty of safeguarding it." Yet in commenting on the unborn person argument in Roe, Justice Blackmun wrote that "the appellee conceded on reargument that no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment." He did so despite the fact that he had cited the case just five paragraphs earlier! The failure of both appellees and the Court to treat this case is both unfortunate and inexplicable. Second, while our system is based upon a reasonable and healthy respect for precedent, this has never prevented the Court from revisiting and modifying precedent when the erroneous foundation and unjust results of that precedent become manifest. Such is the case with respect to abortion and the Fourteenth Amendment.