Category: Abortion

State Crime Lab: Judge’s Reasoning in Fetal Homicide Case “Medically Ludicrous”

Last night Family Council staff member Charisse Dean appeared on KARK News in Little Rock to discuss Circuit Judge Herb Wright’s decision to drop a murder charge in the death of an unborn child earlier this week.

Following the judge’s decision, the Arkansas State Crime Lab, who is responsible for autopsies in homicide investigations, released a statement making three important points:

1. When a pregnant woman dies from trauma — such a gunshot wound — her unborn baby dies from the trauma as well.
2. It is “medically ludicrous” to suggest the unborn baby’s death may have been caused by anything else, as Judge Wright has done in this case.
3. The crime lab’s doctor examined the unborn baby and determined the baby’s death was due to “maternal trauma” — the gunshot that killed the baby’s mother. However, the doctor may not have been given ample opportunity to explain his findings in court.

You can read the State Crime Lab’s full statement below (emphasis added):

“The Arkansas State Medical Examiners Office is charged with the responsibility of determining the cause and manner of death when local authorities request an examination of the body. In most instances, the examination will consist of a full autopsy; in other instances an external examination or a partial autopsy is enough to determine the cause and manner of death within reasonable certainty.

In cases where a pregnant woman dies suddenly and unexpectedly, fetal death occurs within minutes. When the mother has died from trauma, the fetus has died indirectly from trauma as well. In a situation where a pregnant mother has been fatally shot in the head, it is medically ludicrous to suggest that the intrauterine death of her fetus occurred from some other natural cause a short time before her own death. Is such a circumstance theoretically possible? The answer is yes, but with the caveat that the odds of such a circumstance are so incredibly small that they are essentially nonexistent .

When Dr Adam Craig performed the autopsy of Megan Price, he also performed an external examination of the fetus. This showed no evidence that the fetal death occurred prior to the death of the mother. Based on his examinations of the mother and the fetus, as well as his medical analysis, he concluded that the fetal death was due to maternal trauma. This conclusion was made within reasonable medical certainty. In his testimony, it would appear that he did acknowledge that incredibly small chance that the fetal death was not due to maternal trauma, but was not afforded an opportunity to explain how unlikely that would be. In my opinion, the fact that he did not perform an internal examination of the fetus does not significantly weaken the medical rationale for the stated cause of fetal death.

Finally, manner of death is not assigned in cases of fetal death, even when the death was due to violence.”

You can watch KARK’s coverage of this story below or read it here:

Photo Credit: By Rafael Alcarde Palomares (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Arkansas Judge Abuses Power, Ignores Life of Unborn Child in Murder Case

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, October 19, 2017

On Wednesday Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright acquitted a North Little Rock man of murdering an unborn child. In 2015, Quenton King of North Little Rock allegedly shot his mistress who was eight months pregnant, killing both her and her unborn child. The judge acquitted King of murdering the unborn baby, because, he said, prosecutors failed to demonstrate the child was alive at the time.

Family Council President Jerry Cox released a statement, saying, “This is ludicrous. No one should have to prove a person was alive prior to being murdered. We know from court testimony that the woman was eight months pregnant when she was shot. Children born prematurely at eight months routinely go on to live healthy lives. Arkansas law says a person can be charged with murder for causing the death of an unborn child. Judge Wright’s decision in this case ignores Arkansas’ homicide laws, and it ignores the life of this unborn baby.”

Cox called Judge Wright’s decision abusive. “Murder trials exist in part to provide justice for the victims. Judge Wright’s decision denies justice to one of those victims. It would be one thing if a jury had reviewed the case and determined there was not enough evidence to find the defendant guilty. Rather than letting a jury decide if the child was alive, Judge Wright has made that decision for them even though there was no evidence indicating the baby was dead prior to the shooting. The Arkansas Constitution says a judge can be impeached for gross misconduct. If this is not gross misconduct, I don’t know what is.”

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Photo Credit: By Brian Turner (Flickr: My Trusty Gavel) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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CNN Publishes Fake History of Abortion in America

Recently the U.S. House of Representatives voted to prohibit abortions after the twentieth week of pregnancy except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. This federal bill is very similar to a law Arkansas passed in 2013.

As The Washington Post notes, the U.S. is one of only a handful of countries in the world in which abortion after the twentieth week of pregnancy is legal.

Shortly after the House passed the bill, CNN published a video that is nothing short of fiction.

The video claims that at one point abortion simply was part of life in America; that even the Catholic church did not believe life began at conception; that the anti-abortion movement began with doctors wanting to regulate midwives and homeopathic medicine; and that early pro-life activists were primarily concerned with declining birth rates among white women.

Frankly, I had no idea it was possible to cram so much wrong information into 96 seconds, but CNN did. The video is still online, and you can watch it for yourself if you want.

Here’s the truth: Christian leaders always have opposed abortion.

During the first or second century, church leaders circulated a document called The Didache summarizing many basic Christian teachings. Among other things, it said, “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that [child] which is born.”

Our friends at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview write,

“Christians have opposed abortion of all kinds going back to the earliest writings outside of the New Testament . . . . But apparently it’s news to CNN.”

And contrary to the video’s claims, abortion was not simply part of American life. In 1871, an investigative journalist writing for The New York Times said,

Thousands of human beings are thus murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably ruined in constitution, health and happiness. So secretly are these crimes committed and so craftily do the perpetrators inveigh their victims, that it is next to impossible to obtain evidence and witnesses.

Whatever some may say, there simply is nothing new about people — especially Christians — equating abortion with murder.

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