Nine days before Christmas, Lisa Montgomery of Melvern, Kan., went to the Skidmore, Mo., home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett -- who was 8-months pregnant -- and allegedly committed a crime that ought to have been unimaginable. She murdered the expectant mother to steal her unborn child.

 Two days later, the liberal Washington Post began a remarkable investigative series by reporter Donna St. George. St. George spent a year researching murders in which the victim was a pregnant woman or new mother. She learned that "no reliable system is in place to track such cases." But her probing uncovered 1,367 cases nationwide over 14 years.

 In 2001, the Journal of American Medicine published a study of maternal homicides in Maryland. It concluded murder was the state's No. 1 cause of death among new and expectant mothers. "In 2002," reports St. George, "Massachusetts weighed in with a study that also showed homicide as the top cause of maternal death, followed by cancer."

 But the prevalence of maternal homicide is itself a type of cancer -- a cancer on the American soul.

 Why would anyone murder a pregnant woman? Apparently, it is oftentimes an extreme form of abortion.

 St. George noted that many cases involve husbands or boyfriends. Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University, told her, "It seems to me that these guys hope against hope for a miscarriage or an abortion, but when everything else fails, they take the life of the woman to avoid having the baby."

 Minneapolis criminal profiler Pat Brown told her: "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."

 If this is true, the perpetrators are simply taking the logic of Roe vs. Wade one step further. Roe instructed Americans that it is a woman's "right" to make "the problem go away" by aborting a child. Paternal perpetrators of maternal homicides make their "problem go away" by aborting the mother, too.

 As the Feast of the Nativity approached, it may have been a providential hand that parted the dark cloud enveloping the death of Bobbie Joe Stinnett and let through a ray of light: The survival of Bobbie Jo's baby, Victoria Jo, focused national attention on the undeniable humanity of what abortion advocates would prefer to call the "fetus." Continued...