A breath separates one murder from two
Unfortunately, the headline is not new: “Pregnant woman killed, baby cut from womb.” But unlike recent cases in PA and MO, the baby in this story tragically died along with his mother.
The perpetrator will be charged with 2 acts of homicide, right?
Not necessarily, according to the latest reports on the brutal murder of a pregnant OR mother and her preborn baby boy. The backstory, according to ABC News:
Police in a suburb of Portland, OR became suspicious after a woman named Korena Elaine Roberts [pictured right] called for help reporting her newborn wasn’t breathing.
Doctors couldn’t revive the baby, and alerted authorities when they determined Roberts had not given birth. Inside Roberts’ home, they discovered the body of Heather Snively [pictured below left] inside a crawl space.
At this point, police haven’t determined whether Snively gave birth before she died or if the baby was removed….
“There’s so much you don’t know,” said Hall, “Was she alive when they took the baby or not? I mean… is it a double murder? A single murder? And what’s a just punishment?”
Snively was 8 months pregnant. Her baby was viable. But OR law does not consider the killing of a preborn baby a murder. According to Oregonlive.com, June 9:
The grisly death of a 21-year-old pregnant Tigard woman prompted a state senator on Tuesday to seek legislation rewriting OR law to make the killing of an unborn fetus murder, manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.
Sen. Bruce Starr, R-Hillsboro, requested the bill drafted Tuesday. Similar legislation passed the Republican-controlled House in 2005 but did not make it out of the Democrat-controlled Senate….
Under current state law, a child must have taken a breath in order to be considered a victim.
House Bill 2020, which passed the House in 2005, proposed to create the crime of assault of an unborn fetus and expand criminal homicide to include the death of an unborn fetus. The bill stated a person did not commit criminal homicide if the death of the unborn fetus occurred during a lawful abortion. But abortion-rights advocates opposed it.
So here is the situation, according to UPI:
[Roberts] is charged with the death of Snively, not her baby because the unborn child must have taken a breath to meet the legal standard of being alive, Washington Co. prosecutor Bob Hermann said.
“The issue is, was the child alive at all, at any point in time?” he said. “That’s the legal issue we’ve got to try and resolve.”
That last statement was ridiculous, utterly ignorant. Of course the baby was alive, just not born. But this is where we’re at today thanks to legalized abortion, arguing over ridiculous, utterly ignorant points.
The 2004 passed Unborn Victims of Violence Act, aka Laci and Connor’s Law, made it a federal crime to kill a preborn baby, considered “a child in utero.” Scott Peterson is on death row solely because he killed 2 people, not 1: Laci and preborn Connor.
But here we have a case of the murderer not intending to kill what became her 2nd victim. If the baby took a breath, the baby was a legal person, and his death was prosecutable. If that same living baby did not take a breath, he was not a person.
Further adding to the legal quagmire as a result of legalized abortion: Had this baby been killed in any of 45* other states, he would also have been considered a legal homicide victim. Just not OR.
*According to the National Right to Life Committee, 35 states offer blanket legal personhood status and protection – for any reason other than abortion – of preborn babies from conception; 10 states offer protection from later dates, all by the time a baby is viable.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
this is where we’re at today thanks to legalized abortion, arguing over ridiculous, utterly ignorant points.
yup, the utter stupidity of it remains incomprehensible.
The “logic” of abortion has leaked into the practice of medicine and law, into our judiciary system, our international policies etc.
We now have a legal system that tells us an unborn baby is not living when according to all the laws of science it is most definitely alive.
Born alive infant protection act
Not yet born alive infant protection act.
It is an infant and not an adult. So it is child abuse also.
Presumably an autopsy will be done. It will determine whether the baby took a breath or not.
“House Bill 2020, which passed the House in 2005, proposed to create the crime of assault of an unborn fetus and expand criminal homicide to include the death of an unborn fetus. The bill stated a person did not commit criminal homicide if the death of the unborn fetus occurred during a lawful abortion. But abortion-rights advocates opposed it.”
On what grounds??? Good grief!
Sickening. I’m not familiar with state laws in Oregon, but if they have a law that says that babies are “legally not alive” until birth, that is the most retarded thing I’ve read today.
I suspect that there is no such law, and that the prosecutor is simply seeking to curry favor with all the local proaborts. Politics trumps science.
This is wrong on so many levels- wrong because I want to scream at those “pro-woman, pro-choice” supporters that what they are doing is leading to the deaths of women and the torture of children. Wrong because the number one cause of death for pregnant women is murder. And wrong because this human being will receive no justice, and the public records won’t even record his name.
I suppose that I mustn’t lose temper though, with pro-choicers, because being hateful would only make me pro-choice and then we get nowhere.
But things like this are so exhausting. Why can’t he receive personhood? Over a stupid breath? Born people can stop breathing all of the time. The victims of polio weren’t capable of breathing without special equipment…a breath?
So frustrating…
Those liberal Nazis in Oregon are something, arn’t they. No wonder the democrat party is considered the party of death.
I agree with you Vannah! It’s maddening! It’s the death of 2 people, not one. All this personhood cr*p is utter hogwash! Yet the insanity of it is this. If any woman this pregnant were killed or gutted on her way to an abortion clinic, it would be swept under the rug. I was very disappointed to read that Laci Peterson had decided to have an abortion had she had tested positive for a DS child:(
I know that this isn’t the time to be angry, but since I can’t help feeling angry that the pro-choice movement is, in part, responsible for this woman’s death, and they are responsible for this child’s stance in the eyes of the law, I have decided that it is literally impossible to be both “pro-choice” and pro-woman at the same time.
You are so right, Jill… except for one small detail. In the 2nd-to-last paragraph, “45 other states” should say “35 other states,” and in the last paragraph “35 states” should be “25 states.”
bro Dave
When society chooses to ignore or deny reality, the predictable result is continuing and increasing denial culminating in the insanity we now observe in our midst.
It is comical watching the ‘apologists’ climbing further and further out on the rotten limb of their own fertile and fetid imaginings.
How long will before the humanist humpty dumpty has his great fall and how many devotees will frenetically scramble to reassemble the god who could not save himself?
yor bro ken
I was reading a book about a MI medical examiner. He was talking about the death of pregnant women. In his opinion, it was 100% the murder/death of 2 seperate people, but he added that this was not acceptable to some..[the spoiled brat pro-aborts], who DEMAND that others use their language. Fetus, not baby. This ticks people off. Including the MI M.E.!!!!
We all know it’s a baby. It’s just that some don’t want it to be because that would point out the obvious. Every abortion kills a baby by a woman’s choice!
And it’s a bitter pill to swallow because everyone involved in abortion has to speak the truth.
what do you expect? Oregon may be a beautiful state, but they legalized KILLING ONESELF through physician ASSISTANCE.
This baby was WANTED. How can they not see this was a full human being?
It is a baby that is killed in one state but not a baby that is killed in another. Makes perfect sense.
The illogic logic of the proaborts will be their undoing.
I know Liz and Carla, ever feel like you’re going nuts? They call us Right Wing nuts. You’ve got that right. You pro-deathers will drive a person nuts!
It’s amazing how far we’ve fallen as a society. I caught a few minutes of an old classic film the other day, “The Incredible Mr. Limpet”, 1964 with Don Knotts. It’s a really cute story for young kids (3-8 maybe?) but what really struck me was how the movie exuded goodness, morality, righteousness, respect, for elders, police, government, God, women . . .
I guarantee you if Letterman tried to pull the crap he did the other night on a government official and his/her young daughter in 1964, he would have been ostricized and condemned by the media, thrown off the air and probably arrested and jailed for slander and obscenity.
Like Jesus said, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man…” Lu17.26-30