Attack on Pregnant Woman in Colorado Complicated by Abortion Politics
Colorado has it right, because everywhere that laws have been enacted to enable prosecution for killing unborn children they have been used more against doctors and mothers than any criminals because cases like this are exceptionally rare.
A Colorado woman accused of luring an expectant mother to a basement and cutting the baby from her belly might not face homicide charges in the child’s death because of the way criminal law in the U.S. has become entangled in abortion politics.
In a highly charged debate that has played out across the country, Colorado has twice rejected proposals to make the violent death of a fetus a homicide, refusing to join 38 other states and the federal government for fear such a law would be used to restrict abortions.
That could complicate things for prosecutors in the case against Dynel Lane, 34, arrested in the grisly attack at her home Wednesday on a nearly eight-months-pregnant Michelle Wilkins. Wilkins survived; her baby girl died.
“Under Colorado law, essentially no murder charges can be brought if the child did not live outside of the mother,” said Stan Garnett, district attorney of liberal Boulder County.
Keith Mason, the president of Personhood USA, an anti-abortion group that has been pushing for a fetal homicide law in Colorado, called the situation “literally absurd.”
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