Wednesday, January 05, 2011

When a mother's intentional pre-birth actions kill her post-birth child, is it murder?

Is it homicide if a woman tries to kill her unborn child while in the womb but the child is born and then later dies from her pre-birth actions? That's apparently what happened recently in Indianapolis when a mother ate rat poison a week before giving birth.
Police said Monday that the infant's death has been ruled a homicide due to poison.

The 34-year-old mother allegedly told friends she swallowed rat poison Dec. 23. Officer Kendale Adams says investigators believe it was intentional. He doesn't know how far along the woman's pregnancy was at the time.

The friends took the woman to a hospital in Anderson, and she was transferred to an Indianapolis hospital where she gave birth Friday.

The baby died Sunday.

Adams says the woman is in a psychiatric ward at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. The hospital declined to immediately release any information.

Adams says the woman could face murder or attempted feticide charges.
I'd be very interested to see how pro-choice individuals view this case since they typically hold that women can do whatever they want to their bodies. "My body, my choice," right? So if a woman wants to eat rat poison or take some abortifacient herb, that's the woman' choice.

Yet, what if that choice leads to the death of a human child post-birth?

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