Dear Colleague:

It is not just Scott Peterson murdering Laci and his unborn son, Conner.
There is a national trend of men murdering the mothers of their own
children because the women wouldn't have abortions.  These men got angry
when their girlfriends told them they wanted to remain mothers rather than
end their children's lives.  Each of these men, facing a lifetime of child
support, and informed by the culture that fetuses are merely "disposable
commodities," in a vicious twist of logic decided to dispose of the
child's mother as well.  It might well be called "abortion by murder."
 
Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
23 December 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 41

Abortion by Other Means
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
 
After a year-long investigation, the Washington Post came to the
disturbing conclusion that murder is the top killer of expectant and new
mothers.  Pregnant American women are more likely to be killed by other
people than by illness or accident, a situation that is a tribute to
advances in technology and the social organization that has spread it
wide--and to something sinister.

A large proportion of these pregnant women are killed by their boyfriends
or, occasionally, husbands.  Why would these men commit a double homicide,
killing not only their girlfriends but their own unborn children as well?
Killing their own children is the point.  The Post quoted Pat Brown, a
criminal profiler in Minneapolis, on December 19: "If the woman doesn't
want the baby, she can get an abortion.  If the guy doesn't want it, he
can't do a damn thing about it.  He is stuck with a child for the rest of
his life, he is stuck with child support for the rest of his life, and
he's stuck with that woman for the rest of his life.  If she goes away,
the problem goes away."

The Post in its series of articles cited several specific cases in which
men pursued abortion by other means.  Here are a few:

* An 18-year-old who was eight months pregnant "was walking home from a
grocery store when her ex-boyfriend shot her in the head execution-style
because, prosecutors said, he believed fatherhood would get in the way of
his music career.  'This was a big, major inconvenience for him,'
prosecutor Mark Curry said," reported the newspaper.

* "The dead included Ceeatta Stewart-McKinnie, 23, a college student in
Richmond who was beaten to death by her boyfriend.  The couple had dated
on and off for years, and she had had abortions previously, prosecutors
said.  This time, he was married--and she refused to end her pregnancy.
Turkey hunters found her bludgeoned body in the woods."

* "Her circumstances were not ideal, not what a single mother would have
chosen if life always happened according to wishes and plans.  But she
could not bear to have an abortion, she told friends. . . . But Tjane
Marshall was already a father of two and said a baby would ruin his life,
[Shameka] Fludd later told her sisters."  Marshall killed her.

* In the famous case of former Carolina Panthers star Rae Carruth, now in
prison, men opened fire on Chirica Adams' car one night after a date with
Carruth, who didn't want the woman to bear the child of his that she was
carrying.  Carruth was convicted of conspiracy to murder.

One solution could be to give men more control over whether or not they
become fathers.  In a society that holds fatherhood in even greater
contempt than motherhood, men have no legal say over whether their
children are killed in the womb or brought into the world.  And then
mothers receive sole or primary custody of those children an overwhelming
majority of the time, sidelining fathers to paying a monthly bill and
visits every other weekend whether they were once married to the mothers
or not.

But would giving men some power over whether to abort their children do
any good?  Or is the pro-choice, disposable-human mentality to blame for
these men's attitudes in the first place?  Said crime expert Louis Mizell,
"When husbands or boyfriends attack pregnant partners, it usually has to
do with an unwillingness to deal with fatherhood, marriage, child support
or public scandal."

It's not jealousy or some other such imperative that is prompting these
men to murder.  It's the attitude toward children contained in Roe v.
Wade, that inconvenient ones should die.

Giving fathers more control over their born children would serve justice
and reduce incentives for divorce.  And it might induce more responsible
behavior on the part of both men and women.  Most of the women murdered,
according to the Post investigation, were in the dangerous, unstable
situations that have become so common since the 1960s: Pregnant
out-of-wedlock by boyfriends or even just men they knew, pregnant by men
married to other women, or undergoing bitter divorces.  Oftentimes,
women's irresponsible behavior put them in the path of vicious men.

Though no one knows exactly how many such killings there are and only
piecemeal information exists, the statistics we have do not show a large
number of killings compared to America's overall homicide rate.  They
average less than 140 annually (the Post speculates that the real number
could be 300 a year) and that includes not only women who were pregnant,
but those who had given birth in the previous 12 months.  But pregnancy
may have become a major risk factor for murder.

In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
March 21, 2001, Isabelle Horon and Diana Cheng reported their findings
after examining data for the state of Maryland.  "Homicide, the leading
cause of pregnancy-associated death, was responsible for 20.2% of all
pregnancy-associated deaths," they said.  "By comparison, homicide was the
fifth-leading cause of death among Maryland women aged 14 to 44 years who
had not had a pregnancy in the year preceding death."  Horon and Cheng did
say that there could be other factors at work, however, such as: "The
pregnant group was younger and included a higher percentage of
African-American women than the non-pregnant group, factors that are
associated with higher rates of homicide independent of pregnancy."
 
"Pro-choice men are the No. 1 perpetrators of violence against pregnant,
pro-life mothers," said Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life
International.
 
When women can so easily dispose of an inconvenient unborn child, is it
any surprise that men become angry when they refuse to do so?  When men
face a lifetime of expense and responsibility because the mothers of their
children won't exercise their right to choose?  Why shouldn't they be
angry--unless they are pro-life and recognize that unborn children are to
be welcomed into this world, not terminated due to inconvenience.
Abortion is still abortion, by whatever name or method.
 
As we celebrate the birth of Christ, let us remember to thank His mother
for her dedication to motherhood and His stepfather for his dedication to
fatherhood.  They freely accepted parenthood in the most inconvenient of
circumstances.  Let us pray that they will once again be accepted as role
models.

Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

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