If fetuses are not people and do not deserve legal protection, why can you still be charged with killing an unborn baby?
A teenager was found guilty for shooting a pregnant woman two years ago (http://www.wtae.com/news/teen-found-guilty-of-shooting-pregnant-duquesne-girl-15-killing-her-unborn-baby/39394510) -- she survived, but her unborn child was killed as a result. You would think that, with no person dead, the charges would be attempted murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm, etc. But they gave him 3rd degree murder too, meaning that he killed someone unintentionally while trying to kill someone else. But if the unborn aren't people, then they can't be murdered, right? So how does this make sense? Does the life of an unborn child only matter if the mother wants it?
?2016-05-07T12:58:05Z
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The point of making unborn children victims of crime is to destroy the logic of the pro-choice position within the legal system. It makes no sense for a pro-choice person to agree with these kinds of feticide laws because fetuses aren't persons, therefore, they should have no rights or legal protections under our law. If the unborn child can be a victim of crime then how is abortion itself not considered a form of homicide? The unborn dies due to the abortion. Can it not then be argued that an abortionist committed feticide? Or is abortion a form of legal self-defence in the mind of pro-choicers?... Nonetheless, the point is this law brings up the issue of abortion. Pro-choicers who agree with these laws bite themselves in the foot. By doing that, we can slowly make it illegal.
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Nevertheless, the presumption should be that the woman would have carried the pregnancy to term, notwithstanding any contrary evidence because the decision is hers and she could have changed her mind at the last minute.
While states differ in their interpretation and application of the concept in the killing of a pregnant woman, I believe that the correct interpretation is that, but for the act of the killing of the pregnant woman, she would have delivered a child and therefore it is a double homicide.
The woman has the right to choose. That means that if she chooses to let her pregnancy come to term, then it is assumed, very much in accordance with the logic of pro-choicers, that the natural state of being of a living thing growing from its conception to its eventual death (many many decades after birth) is the process of human life that has begun and is in process. Cutting that process short is murder. But if the woman chooses to abort, then it is not a life, and there is no process of development into a "baby" (officially) and then on into other stages of humanity because the destiny of the fetus is to perish as per the will of the mother. Allow me to reiterate: Her choice alters the definition of life because it alters destiny.
A fetus in the womb of a human female is a human fetus, but not a human being until birth. In the case that you sited, the mother had planned to give birth. It was not her 'choice' for someone to shoot her and therefore her 'baby' died in utero. . I think states have different laws about this.