Mother of four stashed fetuses may sue
I 
wrote about Christy Freeman 6 weeks ago.
Police searched Freeman’s Ocean City, MD, home and grounds after she was hospitalized July 27 for retained placenta but denied having been pregnant.
They found four dead preborn babies – the newly delivered under her bathroom vanity, twins in a bedroom chest, and one in a Winnebago in the driveway.
According to several news sources like the Delmarva Daily Times…
Police reports state Christy Freeman confessed that she allegedly birthed a set of twins sometime in 2004 at her Sunset Drive home and allowed one twin to drown in her toilet.
But on September 20 charges were dropped, according to the DDT, because:
… [S]tate medical examiner Dr. Tasha Greenberg concluded there was no proof the babies were ever alive. Some of the remains were years old.
In a murder case, [State Attorney Joel] Todd explained, “you have to prove that the victim of that homicide had ever lived.”
But life and death have been confused since abortion was legalized. Note these discrepancies in the Washington Post:
The medical examiner’s office issued fetal death certificates for all the remains, concluding that the deaths might have occurred naturally based on Freeman’s history of stillborn births, an infection in the placenta doctors found inside her, and her tobacco use and alleged cocaine use.
~ Death certificates for babies they admit lived, just not sure in our air space.
~ Natural death due to cocaine and tobacco use.
(Many states do now provide fetal death certificates, which makes it difficult for abortion proponents who maintain fetuses are just appendages. I’ve never heard of issuing a death certificate for a removed gallbladder or kidney stone.)
We did learn through this process there is no MD law against stashing one’s own dead fetuses and at any rate, mothers are exempt from murder charges if self-aborting – more demonstrations of the callous disregard for human life thanks to abortion.
At any rate, as goes this day and age, Freeman got away with murder and now may sue prosecutors:
[HT: moderator MK and reader MJ; photo courtesy of the Washington Post]
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.
What a great message society sends. Kill your kids, and get paid to boot. This nut is free to roam society? Why do any of us even bother to be law abiding?
She’s a psycho. Maybe if she wins the lawsuit, she will get her tubes tied with the $$.
I just can’t figure out the logic here…
Why is it murder in one state, not murder in another, murder if someone else does it, but not if you do it, murder if the baby took a breath but not if it didn’t, murder if you want the baby but not murder if you don’t…
I feel a Valerie moment coming on…
Yep, here it is…I’m officially confused.
Isn’t murder just murder? When did it become subjective? Maybe I’ll ask Doug.
MK, do you remember the Amy Grossberg case? I read the book. The autopsy revealed that the baby had died as a result of BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA to his skull. Immediately after giving birth, Grossberg ordered her boyfriend to “Get rid of it!” Brian Peterson ran to his car, and he returned with a garbage bag. He slid the 6 pound, 6 and 1/2 inch boy into the bag. He ran out into the frigid November morning and thumped the baby into a dumpster. Just like a basketball. The autopsy revealed that the dumpster did not cause the multiple skull fractures. The defense believed that one of the 2 teens probably bashed his skull in. Each teen only did 2 years. 2 years for a brutal crime like this?
New York Times
November 2, 1997, Sunday
Section: Magazine Desk
Why They Kill Their Newborns
By Steven Pinker
Killing your baby. what could be more depraved? For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb would seem like an ultimate violation of the natural order. But every year, hundreds of women commit neonaticide: they kill their newborns or let them die. Most neonaticides remain undiscovered, but every once in a while a janitor follows a trail of blood to a tiny body in a trash bin, or a woman faints and doctors find the remains of a placenta inside her.
Two cases have recently riveted the American public. Last November, Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, 18-year-old college sweethearts, delivered their baby in a motel room and, according to prosecutors, killed him and left his body in a Dumpster. They will go on trial for murder next year and, if convicted, could be sentenced to death. In June, another 18-year-old, Melissa Drexler, arrived at her high-school prom, locked herself in a bathroom stall, gave birth to a boy and left him dead in a garbage can. Everyone knows what happened next: she touched herself up and returned to the dance floor. In September, a grand jury indicted her for murder.
How could they do it? Nothing melts the heart like a helpless baby. Even a biologist’s cold calculations tell us that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence. Neonaticide, many think, could be only a product of pathology. The psychiatrists uncover childhood trauma. The defense lawyers argue temporary psychosis. The pundits blame a throwaway society, permissive sex education and, of course, rock lyrics.
But it’s hard to maintain that neonaticide is an illness when we learn that it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history. And that neonaticidal women do not commonly show signs of psychopathology. In a classic 1970 study of statistics of child killing, a psychiatrist, Phillip Resnick, found that mothers who kill their older children are frequently psychotic, depressed or suicidal, but mothers who kill their newborns are usually not. (It was this difference that led Resnick to argue that the category infanticide be split into neonaticide, the killing of a baby on the day of its birth, and filicide, the killing of a child older than one day. )
Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sickness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing. We can try to understand what would lead a mother to kill her newborn, remembering that to understand is not necessarily to forgive.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, both psychologists, argue that a capacity for neonaticide is built into the biological design of our parental emotions. Mammals are extreme among animals in the amount of time, energy and food they invest in their young, and humans are extreme among mammals. Parental investment is a limited resource, and mammalian mothers must ”decide” whether to allot it to their newborn or to their current and future offspring. If a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, they may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.
In most cultures, neonaticide is a form of this triage. Until very recently in human evolutionary history, mothers nursed their children for two to four years before becoming fertile again. Many children died, especially in the perilous first year. Most women saw no more than two or three of their children survive to adulthood, and many did not see any survive. To become a grandmother, a woman had to make hard choices. In most societies documented by anthropologists, including those of hunter-gatherers (our best glimpse into our ancestors’ way of life), a woman lets a newborn die when its prospects for survival to adulthood are poor. The forecast might be based on abnormal signs in the infant, or on bad circumstances for successful motherhood at the time — she might be burdened with older children, beset by war or famine or without a husband or social support. Moreover, she might be young enough to try again.
We are all descendants of women who made the difficult decisions that allowed them to become grandmothers in that unforgiving world, and we inherited that brain circuitry that led to those decisions. Daly and Wilson have shown that the statistics on neonaticide in contemporary North America parallel those in the anthropological literature. The women who sacrifice their offspring tend to be young, poor, unmarried and socially isolated.
Natural selection cannot push the buttons of behavior directly; it affects our behavior by endowing us with emotions that coax us toward adaptive choices. New mothers have always faced a choice between a definite tragedy now and the possibility of an even greater tragedy months or years later, and that choice is not to be taken lightly. Even today, the typical rumination of a depressed new mother — how will I cope with this burden? — is a legitimate concern. The emotional response called bonding is also far more complex than the popular view, in which a woman is imprinted with a lifelong attachment to her baby if they interact in a critical period immediately following the baby’s birth. A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual. Her love will gradually deepen in ensuing years, in a trajectory that tracks the increasing biological value of a child (the chance that it will live to produce grandchildren) as the child proceeds through the mine field of early development.
Even when a mother in a hunter-gatherer society hardens her heart to sacrifice a newborn, her heart has not turned to stone. Anthropologists who interview these women (or their relatives, since the event is often too painful for the woman to discuss) discover that the women see the death as an unavoidable tragedy, grieve at the time and remember the child with pain all their lives. Even the supposedly callous Melissa Drexler agonized over a name for her dead son and wept at his funeral. (Initial reports that, after giving birth, she requested a Metallica song from the deejay and danced with her boyfriend turned out to be false.)
Many cultural practices are designed to distance people’s emotions from a newborn until its survival seems probable. Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris. And yet the recent neonaticides still seem puzzling. These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girls’ parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples. But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history. Being young and single are two bad omens for successful motherhood, and the girl who conceals her pregnancy and procrastinates over its consequences will soon be disquieted by a third omen. She will give birth in circumstances that are particularly unpromising for a human mother: alone.
In hunter-gatherer societies, births are virtually always assisted because human anatomy makes birth (especially the first one) long, difficult and risky. Older women act as midwives, emotional supports and experienced appraisers who help decide whether the infant should live. Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist and trained midwife, has studied pelvises of human fossils and concluded that childbirth has been physically tortuous, and therefore probably assisted, for millions of years. Maternal feelings may be adapted to a world in which a promising newborn is heralded with waves of cooing and clucking and congratulating. Those reassuring signals are absent from a secret birth in a motel room or a bathroom stall.
So what is the mental state of a teen-age mother who has kept her pregnancy secret? She is immature enough to have hoped that her pregnancy would go away by itself, her maternal feelings have been set at zero and she suddenly realizes she is in big trouble. Sometimes she continues to procrastinate. In September, 17-year-old Shanta Clark gave birth to a premature boy and kept him hidden in her bedroom closet, as if he were E.T., for 17 days. She fed him before and after she went to school until her mother discovered him. The weak cry of the preemie kept him from being discovered earlier. (In other cases, girls have panicked over the crying and, in stifling the cry, killed the baby.)
Most observers sense the desperation that drives a woman to neonaticide. Prosecutors sometimes don’t prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail. In Europe, the laws of several countries prescribed less-severe penalties for neonaticide than for adult homicides. The fascination with the Grossberg-Peterson case comes from the unusual threat of the death penalty. Even those in favor of capital punishment might shudder at the thought of two reportedly nice kids being strapped to gurneys and put to death.
But our compassion hinges on the child, not just on the mother. Killers of older children, no matter how desperate, evoke little mercy. Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who sent her two sons, 14 months and 3 years old, to watery deaths, is in jail, unmourned, serving a life sentence. The leniency shown to neonaticidal mothers forces us to think the unthinkable and ask if we, like many societies and like the mothers themselves, are not completely sure whether a neonate is a full person.
It seems obvious that we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life. Otherwise, we approach a slippery slope that ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on the value of individual lives. But the endless abortion debate shows how hard it is to locate the boundary. Anti-abortionists draw the line at conception, but that implies we should shed tears every time an invisible conceptus fails to implant in the uterus — and, to carry the argument to its logical conclusion, that we should prosecute for murder anyone who uses an IUD. Those in favor of abortion draw the line at viability, but viability is a fuzzy gradient that depends on how great a risk of an impaired child the parents are willing to tolerate. The only thing both sides agree on is that the line must be drawn at some point before birth.
Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother’s pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood.
What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? Animal-rights extremists would seem to have the easiest argument to make: that all sentient beings have a right to life. But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.
No, the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there’s the rub: our immature neonates don’t possess these traits any more than mice do.
Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. Most philosophers (to say nothing of nonphilosophers) recoil from that last step, but the very fact that there can be a debate about the personhood of neonates, but no debate about the personhood of older children, makes it clearer why we feel more sympathy for an Amy Grossberg than for a Susan Smith.
So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don’t make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn’t allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don’t kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.
The laws of biology were not kind to Amy Grossberg and Melissa Drexler, and they are not kind to us as we struggle to make moral sense of the teen-agers’ actions. One predicament is that our moral system needs a crisp inauguration of personhood, but the assembly process for Homo sapiens is gradual, piecemeal and uncertain. Another problem is that the emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with this uncertain process, so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women. These are dilemmas we will probably never resolve, and any policy will leave us with uncomfortable cases. We will most likely muddle through, keeping birth as a conspicuous legal boundary but showing mercy to the anguished girls who feel they had no choice but to run afoul of it.
This article was published in the New York Times – I did not write it, and and I am not making a profit off of the article. – Carolyn –
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That is sick Heather. These people are all nuts! Heck the whole world is nuts!
Baby Boy Hope’ mom gets 6 years
MATT SUMAN, Morning Journal Writer
02/09/2006
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ELYRIA — The mother of a baby stabbed and tossed into a Columbia Township quarry seven years ago was sentenced yesterday in Lorain County Common Pleas Court to six years in prison for the death of her newborn.
The sentence nearly equals the amount of time the identity of the baby — named Baby Boy Hope by community members after he was discovered July 24, 1999 — remained a mystery. It was not until Jessica Coleman and her former high school sweetheart, Thomas Truelson Jr., were arrested in 2005 that the identity of the baby was known.
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Truelson, who was a college student when the baby was born Feb. 4, 1999, was given two years in prison for throwing the baby’s body, placed inside a duffel bag weighted with rocks, into the remote quarry. Coleman’s attorney, Jack Bradley, said Truelson was the baby’s father, though Truelson has never said so and the county prosecutor’s office never identified him as the baby’s father.
Judge Edward Zaleski sentenced Coleman, 22, of Columbia Township, to six years in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. The maximum penalty she could have received was 24 years in prison.
Coleman was a 15-year-old Columbia High School sophomore when the baby was born.
She is not eligible to apply for early release for five years, according to Bradley, her attorney. He said if her sentence had been less than four years, she could have requested early release after six months.
Truelson, 25, of Columbia Township, was sentenced to two years behind bars yesterday for wrapping Baby Boy Hope in a duffel bag weighted with rocks and throwing it into the Jaquay quarry in Columbia Township. He pleaded guilty in November to gross abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice.
He is eligible to apply for judicial release after six months, according to Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis Will. The maximum penalty Zaleski could have handed down to Truelson was 11 years behind bars.
Coleman, who changed her hair color from blonde to brown since her last court appearance, pleaded guilty in November to involuntary manslaughter, gross abuse of a corpse, two counts of felonious assault, two counts of endangering children and tampering with evidence.
She was taken to the Lorain County jail after the sentencing and Bradley said he expects her to remain there until next week before she is taken to Marysville.
During her statement before the court determined her fate, Coleman told Zaleski, with tears in her eyes and sorrow in her voice, ”I’m so sorry to everyone involved. There’s nothing that can justify my actions. I wish every day I made different decisions.”
Coleman did not explain her actions in court. In a letter she wrote to Zaleski last month, she said she felt like the infant was suffering after he was born and she did not know how to fix him. Bradley wrote in his sentencing memo that Coleman killed the baby because she wanted her child to go to heaven.
”I don’t know why this happened,” she said in court yesterday. ”I have no answers.”
Saying she is sorry does not even begin to explain how she felt, Coleman said to Zaleski. In responding to her statements, Zaleski said she should have sought adoption for her son.
He said the infant had only one person who could protect him.
”That person was you and you failed,” he said. ”Violence against a newborn child should never be an option.”
A sentence of probation without jail time for Coleman would demean the value of the child’s life, Zaleski told her.
”Clearly, haunted by ghosts all these years, you have already paid a steep price,” he said.
Jennifer Marshall, Coleman’s mother, sobbed in court when Zaleski announced the sentence.
Outside the Justice Center, Marshall declined to comment about her daughter’s sentence other than saying, ”She’s great.”
Bradley, who has a daughter, told the court he could not imagine her going through an ordeal such as what Coleman endured.
Truelson apologized to the court before Zaleski handed down his sentence. His sentence was handed down minutes before Coleman appeared before Zaleski.
”I’d like to apologize to everybody I got into this ordeal,” he said. ”I’m completely embarrassed. The regret, the remorse I feel every day is unexplainable.”
Zaleski reminded Truelson that he did not come forward until Coleman confessed to the crime.
”You have certainly put a damper on the citizens of Lorain County not solving this crime (for more than six years),” Zaleski said.
Truelson was also fined $5,000 and $2,000 of the fine was suspended if he pays the $3,000 to Birthright of Lorain County, 333 Depot St., within 30 days.
Neal Jamison, Truelson’s attorney, told the court before Truelson’s sentencing that he lost his teaching job at the Lorain County Academy in November. Jamison also said that the state is seeking to permanently revoke Truelson’s teaching license and it is likely he will never teach again.
Bradley said yesterday evening that he plans to visit Coleman in jail Sunday and they will discuss whether they will appeal the sentence.
”We’re going to look into a possible appeal of the judge’s sentence,” he said. ”I was disappointed the judge gave her a sentence that does not provide for early release until five years. The sad thing is that the father of the child can get out after six months and she can’t.”
Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis Will said yesterday afternoon that he believed that time behind bars is appropriate for Coleman.
”I think that it’s a tragic situation,” he said.
Assistant Prosecutor Tony Cillo argued in court that a prison term was warranted for Coleman’s crime.
”It’s hard to find a case that touched the county more than this case,” he said. ”It’s really hard to find a more serious case than this one.”
Cillo told the court that the infant was deformed at birth because Coleman used drugs and alcohol during her pregnancy.
Bradley said in court that the remorse Coleman showed was not because she faced prison time. He argued that when she was behind bars in Medina County for six months in connection with a drug case and took steps toward becoming a better person.
Coleman declined an interview request with The Morning Journal yesterday from the county jail. She told jail officials that she wanted to speak to Bradley before commenting on her sentence.
Bradley said that Coleman hopes to counsel pregnant teens if she is given the opportunity. He said inmates with honor status are often allowed to go out into the community to talk to young girls.
He added that young, pregnant girls did not have the option to remain anonymous and leave infants in the care of a hospital during the time when Coleman delivered her son.
The baby, which Coleman eventually told authorities she named Steven, was found July 24, 1999, on a ledge 17 feet under water, according to Lorain County Sheriff’s Detective Karl Yost, who reactivated the investigation a couple years ago. Recreational divers found the bag containing the baby’s body in the duffel bag, according to the sheriff’s department.
Last May, Coleman reportedly broke down and told a boyfriend about the baby while they were vacationing in Florida. Bradley said in court when Coleman’s boyfriend started to talk about getting married, she could not keep the secret from him any longer.
Yost, who had spent much of his personal time reviewing the case, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
here’s one more. These last 2 girls are from my state.
On the afternoon of May 1, 1997, 17-year-old Audrey Iacona gave birth to a son, alone, in the basement of her parents’ Granger Township home. At some point, that infant died.
These are the only two facts presented in Iacona’s murder trial on which Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman and Iacona’s defense team of Richard Marco and Mark DeVan agree.
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Audrey Iacona. Sun photo by Jeannine Mathis-Bertosa.
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Iacona’s attorneys contend the infant was born dead to a young, confused and frightened mother. She concealed every aspect of her pregnancy, down to several hours of excruciating labor, from family members, school officials and even her boyfriend, Gary Gaydemski, 19, of Parma Heights.
They say an aunt and three close girlfriends were the only people Iacona trusted with her secret.
Prosecutors claim this is a case in which the sanctity of human life simply got in the way of a young lady who wanted her freedom. They allege Iacona’s son was born alive and was suffocated when Iacona wrapped him in a blue bath towel and placed him inside two white kitchen-size trash bags.
It’s now up to a jury to decide when and how the baby died and whether Iacona should be convicted. She was tried on six felony charges on which she was indicted by a grand jury last summer for the death of her newborn son. Those charges include murder, involuntary manslaughter, endangering a child and abuse of a corpse.
If convicted of murder, Iacona, now a senior at Highland High School, could face 15 years to life in prison.
DeVan told jurors this was Iacona’s second pregnancy in less than two years and that she acted irrationally because she did not want her parents to find out she was pregnant again, even after continued warnings.
Because Iacona did not gain weight and had irregular bleeding throughout the pregnancy, she was uncertain whether she was pregnant almost up to the date she delivered.
Throughout her seven-month pregnancy, she maintained her spot on the school cheerleading team, tried out for the track team and even participated in a charity fashion show in which she had to model tight-fitting clothing.
And still, no one knew.
It was not until that spring afternoon, alone in the basement of her State Road home, when her worst fears came true, DeVan said during opening statements of the trial.
?
Iacona stayed home from Holy Name High School that day complaining of stomach pains that had started some time during the night. Iacona attributed the cramping to ongoing gastrointestinal problems, and had even taken an antacid for relief.
That afternoon, Iacona was still suffering. When she went to get a pizza from a freezer located in the basement, she said the pain grew even more intense. DeVan said Iacona felt a sharp pain “unlike any other she had felt before,” and at that point began associating the pain with labor contractions.
DeVan claims it was a very rapid labor and that Iacona panicked, knowing that it was two months too early for her to deliver. After pushing once, Iacona felt something between her legs.
Once she realized it was the baby’s head, she knelt down on one knee with her hands under the baby’s head in case he fell, and delivered the rest of him. She cut the umbilical cord herself with a pair of utility shears laying nearby and placed the baby on a blanket, DeVan said.
DeVan insists the baby did not cry or appear to be breathing and that his skin was discolored. He said Iacona cleaned his mouth, turned him on his side, but he still showed no signs of life. She assumed the infant was dead, wrapped him in a towel and placed him inside a plastic bag.
“Audrey thought the infant was dead. Now confusion and terror became fear,” DeVan said. “She had no idea what to do or who to tell. And even if she did, she did not know what to say. All she knew was there was a dead baby in her basement and she did not know what to do with it.”
All the while, her father Mark and mother Angela, a nurse, were upstairs getting ready for work. Yet Iacona never cried out in pain or called for help, DeVan said.
Even though she could barely stand, she went upstairs to a second floor bathroom, took a shower and delivered the placenta. A short time later, she received a call from her friend Lynn Scherma, 19, of North Royalton. During the conversation, Iacona told her that she had delivered a baby boy in the basement and it was born dead, DeVan said.
Horrified by the news, Scherma called her father at work and he relayed the information to authorities via a 911 call. A few hours later, detective Tadd Davis of the Medina County Sheriff’s Office discovered the baby’s body concealed in plastic bags under a pile of blankets in the utility room.
?
DeVan calls the incident a spontaneous abortion and told the jury he has the medical experts and testimony to prove it. He also argues that if the baby had been alive at birth, “it did not breathe for long.”
But four medical experts testifying for the prosecution say the 3.8-pound baby boy was born alive and lived for at least two to six minutes. They say that medical evidence collected during the May 2 autopsy of the infant revealed there was no evidence to support Iacona’s claim that the baby was stillborn.
“This baby was born alive and all it needed to stay that way was a warm blanket and an emergency phone call,” said Dr. Paul Gatewood, an Akron-based obstetrician and gynecologist who has delivered more than 4,000 babies in the 28 years he has been in practice.
After examining autopsy findings, Gatewood said that even though the baby was born premature, there is 98 percent probability that he could have survived with proper medical attention. Since the baby was born without any congenital abnormalities, the odds might have been even greater, he said.
Gatewood also refuted Iacona’s claims of a rapid delivery, stating that the baby’s head would not have been molded if it was a rapid delivery.
The question of whether Iacona suspected she was going into labor is expected to be an important element in the case.
Prosecutors contend Iacona knew she was in labor and could have gotten proper medical attention. The defense argues she could not have known she was in labor because she had no prior experience in identifying contractions.
Cristin Rolf conducted the autopsy at the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office. During her testimony, she claimed that internal and external examinations, X-rays and toxicology reports all pointed to asphyxia as the cause of death.
Rolf said any physical changes physicians usually look for in cases of asphyxia were absent and there were no cuts or bruises on the child. However, medical tests still confirmed that the infant took more than a breath of agony upon dying because such a large portion of his lungs, trachea, stomach and small intestine were aerated.
For that much air to be present in the baby’s body, he had to have been born alive and had to have taken more than five or six breaths, Rolf said.
Rolf’s supervisor, Robert Challener, said the baby’s lungs were a salmon pink color and their rubbery texture was starting to diminish. Had the baby been born dead, its lungs would have been gray in color and would have been very rubbery.
A “float test” of the baby’s lungs also concluded that the infant had been born alive. When placed in a glass of water, the lungs floated. Had there been no air in the lungs, they would have sunk to the bottom of the glass, she said.
Mark Collin, a neonatal pediatrician at Cleveland’s Metro General Hospital, agreed with the testimony of the other physicians.
“This baby had to live long enough to expand its lungs this much. One or two breaths cannot cause this amount of aeration,” Collin said. “Agonal breaths would not be strong enough to push air into the small intestine.”
Rolf and Challener admitted, however, that nobody, including physicians, “will ever know whether the baby was dead at the time he was placed in the plastic bag.”
The defense is hoping that testimony prevails in the minds of jurors as the defense presents its evidence this week.
“This case is really about a fearful teen-ager trapped in an adult’s body,” DeVan said. “Audrey is guilty of being a scared teen-ager. Audrey is guilty of making mistakes. But that does not make Audrey guilty of a crime.”
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“Many states do now provide fetal death certificates, which makes it difficult for abortion proponents who maintain fetuses are just appendages.”
I know in Illinois they give them out at 20 weeks and later. I always wonder what they would do if the woman had a still birth/micarriage at a hospital before 20 weeks and wanted to take her baby with her to bury it somewhere. Think they would let her?
Amy Grossberg, 2 and 1/2 years, Melissa Drexler, 3 years, Audry Iacona, 2 years, Jessica Coleman, 6 years [maybe early release] Christy Freeman, FREE! America had better stop pussy footing around, and stop playing with these women. They all deserve life sentences. No wonder they keep getting away with murder.
Maybe this woman was just in a state of shock and felt like a failure because she lost the pregnancies and that’s why she didn’t tell anyone. And maybe she kept the remains close to her because she couldn’t bare to part with them.
Rick Santorum brings a dead fetus home and lets his kids “kiss and cuddle” it, and he’s a pro-life hero.
Christy Freeman keeps a dead fetus or two, and you guys want to prosecute.
Make up your minds.
Jess, it’s a theory. Who knows? With the easy availability to abortion, why do crimes like these still exist? Actually, they seem to be on the rise.
I’ve never heard of Rick Santorum. Do you have a link as to what he did?
Laura you have such a messed up way with words.
Heather,
http://www.catholiccompany.com/product_detail.cfm?ID=823
It sounds like Freeman murdered her children and buried them. Did Rick do the same?
Heather,
His wife wrote a book called “Letters to Gabriel”
Put Rick Santorum Gabriel in your search engine and you could read all night.
There is a difference between what he did and what these women did. Anyone with a heart can see that.
It sounds like Freeman murdered her children and buried them.
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The Maryland State Medical Examiner says there’s NO EVIDENCE of that happening.
MK and rosie, thank ou for the info. I’ll research it a little later. Laura, don’t you find it twisted that she had buried babies everywhere? I sure do. She’s a wack job.
Why did Freeman deny being pregnant to the hospital staff?
Years ago my grandfather told my mother she would live in an age of educated fools. Well here it is.
“Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder.”
What idiocy. Literally. The opinion of one.
I assume this writer is educated and I would assert, a fool as well. Just because someone has a degree and writes a bunch of papers that he passes around to colleagues does not make him any sort of authority on moral issues and there is no reason we should listen to him regardless of his eloquence or articulation.
Moral philosophers? like who? Nitzsche?
This author needs consider the numbers as a % of births. At over 3,000,000 births annually in the US alone, even if all these homocides were only in the US that would be an order of magnitude below one tenth of one percent, a statistical rarity not anthropological evidence for natural selection.
Let’s use our critical thinking skills here people.
Natural selection would reduce the phenomenon anyway. Those carrying a gene or group of genes so defective that the organism does not survive to pass it on. In this case the one with the alleged gene kills the offspring before it can reproduce. Not natural, but selection.
We have laws written and approved by those who understand morality to protect society from those who have demonstrated their inability to act in a moral fashion.
What I find amazing is the leniency. As though women should be held to a lowered standard because of perceived limited mental or emotional capacity.
The notion that these women are not deficient in other areas is spurious and should not be used to insulate them from punishment for their crimes.
hippie, THANK YOU!
hippie, women get more time for drug abuse and DUI’s. We have had a few local cases of men shaking babies and killing them in the process. The sentences were LIFE without parole!!! However, a woman can stab, punch, drown her newborn, and she gets public sympathy. Outrageous!
“The Maryland State Medical Examiner says there’s NO EVIDENCE of that happening.”
I’ll bet you a crack pipe that that is what happened.
rosie, LOL! Sad thing is, I’ll bet she would have gotten more time for crack possession. Blah!
I’ll bet you she cracked ’em with a pipe!
4?
I mean c’mon. You’re not even allowed to bury your dog in the backyard…let alone 4 dogs!
Ya, and some people thought OJ was innocent too.
Give it time. These stupid arses who allowed her to skate will find a few more dead babies in her back yard. Didn’t the Green River Killer bury some women in his yard? Gacy buried a few boys all around his house. Sounds like she suffers from the same syndrome. Won’t she have to follow up with a shrink? How about rehab? Another slime slips through the cracks. No pun intended.
amen heather.
Does the name Marybeth Tinning ring a bell?
Folks on a pro-life site never heard of Rick Santorum? To put it simply, he was the loudest advocate for pro-life in the US Senate until he was voted out in 2006. He was targeted by the Democrat Party mainly because he is so strongly pro-life, and he was the victim of endless smears, as you can clearly see if you Google his name.
One of his children, Gabriel, died shortly after birth. He and his family chose to grieve by taking Gabriel’s body home so that they could say goodbye before he was buried. The pro-aborts, hell-bent on attacking anything and everything about the man, decided to make fun of him for daring to grieve his dead son in this manner. It was and is completely pathetic, but it’s nothing I don’t expect from these ridiculous pro-aborts. The idea that Santorum’s situation is in any way analogous to that of this woman is ludicrous.
Rick Santorum brings a dead fetus home and lets his kids “kiss and cuddle” it, and he’s a pro-life hero.
Christy Freeman keeps a dead fetus or two, and you guys want to prosecute.
Make up your minds.
Posted by: Laura at September 26, 2007 7:15 PM
Laura,
Continuing from the other thread regarding Maggie Sanger. Give it up. You are making a useless comparison. These two stories have ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING IN COMMON. GET IT????
THIS WOMAN IS CLEARLY DERANGED, WACKO, DEMENTED.
SHE LET ONE BABY DROWN IN THE TOILET AND STASHED THEM ALL IN HER HOUSE.
You see Laura, it is a legal choice these families are given. They are allowed by law to take their children home to to grieve. They are abiding by the laws and they are exercising their right to choose to honor and cherish their babies who die. Just like the irresponsible monsters who are given a legal choice to tear their babies apart limb from limb and have them tossed away like they were yesterdays trash.
Make up your mind. Are you for choice or not??
Heather,
Rick Santorum took his still born baby home to respect, honor and cherish him with his family.
Many families who lose a baby decide to do this so they can grieve in their own home with their families. The babies then must be buried in a cemetary or cremated according to state laws if they are 20 weeks and over. Families also take beautiful portraits of their babies to keep. Many hosptals are training their nurses to do the photography in the hospital if a professional is unavailable. There is a whole group of volunteer photographers who are on call to do this for free.
Rosie,
Depending on state laws babies born under 20 weeks are allowed to be taken home and buried where the family decides. It may be in a grave site over another loved one, or in their own back yard where they can plant a tree or beatiful perenial over the site.
John and Sandy, thank you both. I did read some horribe things about this poor man. It’s too vile to repeat. Sadly written by the hate filled, rabid pro deathers!
One more question, what is she allowed to sue for?
Why is it murder in one state, not murder in another, murder if someone else does it, but not if you do it, murder if the baby took a breath but not if it didn’t, murder if you want the baby but not murder if you don’t…
Depends on the law, MK.
John and Sandy, thank you both. I did read some horribe things about this poor man. It’s too vile to repeat.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Translation: I still have no idea who Rick Santorum is, and I haven’t read a thing about him.
Doug,
Depends on the law, MK.
No Kidding! The question is, why is the law so convoluted?
Laura, I ran his name through my search engine. It only takes a minute.
Laura says that the state of Maryland didn’t have enough evidence to convict Freeman……………………..Translation…I support psycho baby killers!!!
Heather,
Snaps to you! Great comeback.
Laura, I’m beginning to wonder about your mental stability. Did you have a bad childhood? Hitler would have been proud of you.
Heather,
Snaps to you! Great comeback.
Thank you Sandy. Any “normal” person should realize that Freeman did NOT act/behave like a normal person! Had her elderly mother passed away, would it be acceptable to bury her in the back yard? That’s what funeral homes are for.
Laura, if my husband dropped dead, should I toss his carcass into the back of my Winnebago? Make sense? Did you ever see Psycho with Anthony Perkins? Doesn’t this sound the same??
Heather: Thank you Sandy. Any “normal” person should realize that Freeman did NOT act/behave like a normal person! Had her elderly mother passed away, would it be acceptable to bury her in the back yard? That’s what funeral homes are for.
Posted by: heather at September 27, 2007 8:25 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Apparently that would be just fine with Sandy:
Depending on state laws babies born under 20 weeks are allowed to be taken home and buried where the family decides. It may be in a grave site over another loved one, or in their own back yard where they can plant a tree or beatiful perenial over the site.
Posted by: Sandy at September 26, 2007 9:03 PM
Laura, you are missing the point! Daffy duck hid her pregnancies, and was hittin the crack pipe all the while. OMG, then one day she felt a squish between her legs. OMG, A BABY! How did this happen? Let me get out my shovel and get ta diggin. Hide the evidence!!
Sandy,
“Depending on state laws babies born under 20 weeks are allowed to be taken home and buried where the family decides. It may be in a grave site over another loved one, or in their own back yard where they can plant a tree or beatiful perenial over the site.”
That is a huge problem for Catholics though. We believe they have to be buried on holy ground, not in our backyard. Do cemetary’s actually let you put them above another loved one’s grave??? My sister-in-law had 2 miscarriages, she buried them in her backyard, and every time she moved she would have to dig the box up and bring it with her in the hope that she could find a place to properly bury them. Well, nowhere would they let her do it so when we buried my daughter we just put their box in there with her. Not everyone will get to do that, it’s really sad.
Laura, this woman put her kids in a drawer and a camper…..”Norman, put me in the chair by the window.” This is not the behavior of a mentally stable woman.
Hi Rosie,
Good questions. Most cemetaries will allow you to bury a baby in the same grave site as a loved one at no charge. Many cities have special cemetaries for miscarried babies and stillborns where they are all buried together.
In my state, all babies whether intentionally aborted, miscarried or stillborn must be buried together if the parents opt not to take them for thier own burial. The remains cannot be tossed away as medical waste.
Most states just allow hospitals to throw the babies away and incenerate them with all of the other medical waste.
Unfortunately, doctors and medical professionals rarely give women the option to decide how they want their babies buried.
We went to our state legislature and tried to pass a bill last session to mandate that women are told what their options are, so they don’t find out later they had an opportunity to respectfully bury their little ones but didn’t.
This just adds to the trauma of losing a baby.
Kansas paralleled this bill and I believe it passed. Ours didn’t thanks to the PC lunitics who continue to throw women under the bus so they can save their right to kill their babies and not have them recognized as anything but trash. Our bill died in committee.
Once again the pro-choicers prove themselves to be hypocrites. We just want women to have a choice as to how to handle the disposition of their babies. They didn’t want women to have that important choice. Go figure.
I spoke to the woman who initiated this bill in Kansas. She lost her 18 week old and her doctor never gave her any options on how to officially end the pregnancy. She just instructed her to go and have a D&E.
One week later she was really upset and started thinking about what happened to her baby. The nurses at the hospital refused to tell her so she called her Dr. Her Dr. refused to tell her at first, but finally caved and told her the baby was tossed away in the hospital incinerator.
She was very angry that she wasn’t given any options on naturally birthing her baby so she could honor him and bury him in accordance with her own personal wishes.
I have had two devastating miscarriages and lost one in my home. I was so unprepared what to do.
After several days, we found out we could bury my baby ontop of my grandmother’s grave. We opted to do that as well when my second miscarriage occurred.
Another woman I know lost her 20 week old in the toilet at home in the middle of the night during a rainstorm. Her and her husband were so ditraught they buried her in the backyard, not knowing what to do.
Sandy,
so sad, what state are you in?
Hey Rosie,
Minnesota. I am so sorry to hear about your sister’ losses and your daughter. How nice that you were able to bury them together.
Hey Rosie,
Minnesota. I am so sorry to hear about your sister’ losses and your daughter. How nice that you were able to bury them together.
Posted by: Sandy at September 27, 2007 2:55 PM
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Absolutely!
…And yours too, Sandy.
$1,000,000 says she kept them and planned to bury them at a different home.
(I wasn’t going to bring up the fact that I helped a ex-neighbor dig up a miscarried child when she moved – I assumed I’d be hunted down and locked up…) I think that it happens WAY more often than people realize – JUST JUDGING FROM THIS BOARD I’d have to believe that. I deal with grief in a very private way myself.
(Although I still think letting the kids play with a dead fetus is as weird as freak show sushi.)
Wow Laura,
You do have some compassion.
Yes, this does happen way more than you know. I hardly doubt in the above women’s case she intended on taking them with her. When she stashed them all over without regard to any respect shown to them, that shows she was trying to cover something up. The woman is nuts.
I hardly doubt Rick Santorum brought their baby home for the kids to play with. Laura, you have to realize that losing a child is the most devestating event in one’s life. It doesn’t matter that the baby was so young. It was still their child.
Would someone greive any less for a son or daughter that died at 8 years old vs. 20 years old just because they were younger. I doubt it.
Same goes for a stillborn at 20 weeks, 36 weeks, or delivered stillborn. It is all very devestating. The history of bereavement photography shows that is was perfectly acceptable and considered the norm for families to take photos of their dead babies while being held in a family setting. Somehow that was abandoned along the way and now it is very popular.
I met a couple just last year who brought their stillborn home to grieve with their family. Instead of spending time in a hospital setting on a maternity ward, they wanted to have privacy in their own home to spend time with their baby and family members before they had a respectful burial. These people were as normal as you can get. You would be surprised what emotions come out after a loss.
I hope you are learning something from this thread. You have no idea what it is like to hold your dead baby in your hands and not know what to do.
PS,
And by my last statement, I do not include the woman in the story. She did nothing but disrespect the lives her her children.
Sandy,
I never got a response from the hospital when I left them a message asking for my pictures, good thing we took our own.
“You would be surprised what emotions come out after a loss.”
I explained it like this to someone: It kills a part of you but it also wakes up a part of you that you never knew was there.
Rosie,
It kills a part of you but it also wakes up a part of you that you never knew was there.
That is so beautiful…
At one of the clinics where I pray, a man comes with a truck on Tuesdays. He double parks, gets out, rolls up the back door, takes out a dolly and goes into the clinic. 20 minutes later he comes out with the dolly loaded up with boxe…containing the remains of the babies that died there the previous week. We baptize them when we can. Then he drives off to who knows where.
I have a sheet (from a few years back…the guy on it is no longer in business and from what I’ve found on the internet he’s seems to be AWOL) with a list of fetal body parts and prices.
An intact brain will bring you $1,000.00 bucks while a damaged one is only worth $30.00. There’s prices for kidneys, arms, legs, lungs…
There is another company that does it too tho for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. It was on Dateline some years ago. It’s still in business…
Depraved.
Fetal Harvesting
For the first time, hear an informant reveal how babies (sometimes live) are harvested from abortion clinics for resale. Courtesy of Life Dynamics.
LDI-Informant.jpg (2808 bytes)
Part #1
An informant (in disguise), describes how she (and others at the company she worked for) gathered fetal tissue at abortion clinics for later resale to pharmaceutical companies.
Part #2
Describes how she
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/harvest.htm
“Depends on the law, MK.”
No Kidding! The question is, why is the law so convoluted?
“Convoluted”? It’s just not exactly the same all places.
An intact brain will bring you $1,000.00 bucks while a damaged one is only worth $30.00.
Well, MK, sounds to me like if a hundred of us people who post here got together, we could get $3000 for our brains.
Doug
Doug,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIlKiRPSNGA
Jill Staneks site, in person!
MK,
I am so sad right now. These people are monsters. Again, how can any of you pro-aborts on this site even think it is ok to support this. It is vile and digusting.
If someone would do this to a newborn defenseless puppy, I’m sure they would spend time in jail. I am sure ALL of you pro-aborts would rush in to try and save this puppy and rightfully turn in anyone who would do this.
Just recently a man broke the neck of a duck that is kept with 7 others in an indoor pond in a local hotel. He is in BIG trouble. I don’t know what the charges are, but this story has been all over the news.
Sandy- I don’t deny that most likely, this woman killed her newborns. We have a justice system in this country that says someone is innocent until they are proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Because the medical examiner cannot determine if the newborns for sure met with any kind of foul play, there is not enough conclusive evidence to get that kind of conviction. It’s how the legal system works. Doesn’t mean we support it. Just means that’s how it is.
sandy “I am so sad right now. These people are monsters. Again, how can any of you pro-aborts on this site even think it is ok to support this. It is vile and digusting.”
Sandy,
because many pro-aborts are monsters themselves…
Erin,
Sorry, my response was to MKs following post:
“Describes how she
“because many pro-aborts are monsters themselves…”
[insert monster roar here]
“because many pro-aborts are monsters themselves…”
[insert monster roar here]
Ha! Indeed, Hal.
Gotta love it….
Doug