Infanticide and Unintended Consequences in Maryland

And well he should. Here is a case where machine law risks allowing a grave, moral injustice on the basis of an exception inserted out of purely political motivation. If Freeman is found to have purposefully killed her own unborn children, then that technicality should not exonerate her of the crime of infanticide. It would be logically and morally untenable for the state to hold simultaneously that it is murder for someone to kill a woman's unborn child, but A-OK for the woman to kill it herself.

Indeed, this tension was precisely the reason feminists heatedly objected to the prosecution of Scott Peterson, Laci and Conner Peterson's killer, for the death of Conner. It is also why they strongly opposed subsequent legislation, such as the fetal-homicide laws in Maryland and many other states as well as the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004. Recognizing the horror of infanticide perpetrated by an outside attacker is only a small step away from recognizing the horror of infanticide regardless of the killer's identity.

Regardless of the law, this horror is all too real in Ocean City, Maryland. Only a callous, rote adherence to statutory exception could deny it according to subsection (F). That is the core of machine law. But a cache of infant corpses cannot be stripped of its awfulness by the "if" clause of a mother's string of self-induced abortions.

The abortionistas would say otherwise, of course; but that is because they have to hold that uncertain ground, having lost the debate on the murders of Conner Peterson and other unborn children. They're not happy with the plot they're left to defend. They know it is a very slippery slope.