Abortion in Maryland

OPINION:

Under Maryland’s still-untested fetal homicide law, the questions of when, how and by whom an unborn child’s life is extinguished would be crucial in determining whether the state could charge the perpetrator with murder. “Was it viable?” is key to the inquiry set up by Maryland’s 2005 law. Even then, self-performed abortions are considered exempt, as, of course, are the actions of professional abortionists.

In other words, the state of fetal homicide law in Maryland is very much in keeping with the lock of abortionism on American government and a reflection of the continued unprotection of the unborn. With such barriers and loopholes, Maryland’s law would seem to be something of a sham, concocted, like many others, in the wake of the Scott and Laci Peterson murder.

All this is underscored by last week’s gruesome discovery in Ocean City of four tiny corpses found inside and outside her home. The awful evidence was discovered in a police search following suspicious behavior at an area hospital by a 37-year-old woman, Christy Freeman, who, despite signs of recently giving birth, insisted that she had not. Prosecutors initially charged her with murder — setting up a potentially unprecedented test for the fetal-homicide statute. But the suspect later admitted to delivering twins in a live birth and letting at least one die in a toilet. Since the barbarity to which the suspect confessed is readily prosecuted under conventional murder charges, authorities switched the charges.

Thirty-five states keep fetal-homicide laws of some form on the books. None of them are ironclad and many are for show. The National Right to Life Committee calls Maryland a “partial coverage” state, where laws are “gravely deficient because they do not recognize unborn children as victims during certain periods of their pre-natal development.”

It would be a fair question in the Ocean City case, were it prosecuted under the fetal-homicide statute, whether the prosecution of Christy Freeman were simply a penalty for the alleged perpetrator’s lack of a medical degree and a license to perform the act. This, of course, the pro-life view, is the one which abortionists cannot countenance. It will not be tested, not this time.

There is another Maryland case, however, which is likelier to result in a test for the state’s fetal homicide law. In June, Baltimore County prosecutors charged 24-year-old David L. Miller with two counts of first-degree murder after the fatal shooting of Elizabeth Walters, 24, who was seven months’ pregnant. Insofar as pro-choicers admit that real fetal-homicide laws would be warranted — as many have — this reduces matters to an argument on behalf of want. Only if a pregnancy is wanted by the parent is termination not to be considered murder. If that is not suggestive of moral wrong, not much else would be.