After a year-long investigation, the Washington Post came to the disturbing conclusion that murder is the top killer of expectant and new mothers. Pregnant American women are more likely to be killed by other people than by illness or accident, a situation that is a tribute to advances in technology and the social organization that has spread it wide, and to something sinister.
Killer Fathers
A large proportion of these pregnant women are killed by their boyfriends or, occasionally, husbands. Why would these men commit at double homicide, killing not only their girlfriends but their own unborn children as well? Killing their own children is the point. The Post quoted Pat Brown, a criminal profiler in Minneapolis, on December 19, 2004: “lf 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.”
The Post in its series of articles cited several specific cases where men pursued abortion by other means. Here are a few:
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An 18-year-old who was eight months pregnant “was walking home from a grocery store when her ex-boyfriend shot her in the head execution-style because, prosecutors said, he believed fatherhood would get in the way of his music career.”
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“The dead included Ceeatta Stewart-McKinnie, 23, a college student in Richmond who was beaten to death by her boyfriend. The couple had dated on and off for years, and she had had abortions previously, prosecutors said. This time, he was married — and she refused to end her pregnancy.”
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In the famous case of former Carolina Panthers star Rae Carruth, now in prison, men opened fire on Chirica Adams’ car one night after a date with Carruth, who didn’t want the woman to bear the child of his that she was carrying. Catruth was convicted of conspiracy to murder.
No Control for Fathers
One solution could be to give men more control over whether or not they become fathers. In a society that holds fatherhood in even greater contempt than motherhood, men have no legal say over whether their children are killed in the womb or brought into the world. And then mothers receive sole or primary custody of those children an overwhelming majority of the time, sidelining fathers to paying a monthly bill and visits every other weekend whether they were once married to the mothers or not.
But would giving men some power over whether to abort their children do any good? Or is the pro-choice, disposable-human mentality to blame for these men’s attitudes in the first place? Said crime expert Louis Mizell, “When husbands or boyfriends attack pregnant partners, it usually has to do with an unwillingness to deal with fatherhood, marriage, child support or public scandal.”
It’s not jealousy or some other such imperative that is prompting these men to murder. It’s the attitude toward children contained in Roe v. Wade, that inconvenient ones should die.
Giving fathers more control over their born children would serve justice and reduce incentives for divorce. And it might induce more responsible behavior on the part of both men and women. Most of the women murdered, according to the Post investigation, were in the dangerous, unstable situations that have become so common since the 1960s: Pregnant out-of-wedlock by boyfriends or even just men they knew, pregnant by men married to other women, or undergoing bitter divorces. Oftentimes, women’s irresponsible behavior put them in the path of vicious men.
Though no one knows exactly how many such killings there are and only piecemeal information exists, the statistics we have do not show a large number of killings compared to America’s overall homicide rate.
Violent Pro-Choice Men
“Pro-choice men are the No. 1 perpetrators of violence against pregnant, pro-life mothers,” said Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International.
Recently, we celebrated the birth of Christ. Let us remember to thank His mother for her dedication to motherhood and His foster father for his dedication to fatherhood. They freely accepted parenthood in the most inconvenient of circumstances. Let us pray that they will once again be accepted as role models,
