The incident that inspired this Utal law is an absolute jaw-dropper. How any
woman could be so callous, or so mentally unstable, or so desperate, to do
this sort of thing against her own body, and against the life growing within
her, defies imagination. This young girl paid a stranger to beat her up, in
the hope that it would result in a miscarriage. I am really having a hard
time wrapping my head around such an act.

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. The baby survived the cruel
onslaught, and was adopted by a Utah couple.

I have to wonder what kind of a relationship people who do such things, have
with God. Surely they must realize that what they are doing is extremely
evil and wrong; don't they?


Utah Bill Would Criminalize Illegal Abortions

By KIRK JOHNSON - NYT

February 28, 2010


DENVER -- The origins of Utah State House Bill 12 lie in an act of dark and
desperate violence.

Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican, has said he agrees generally with the
goals of legislation that would criminalize illegal abortions. The measure
is now awaiting his signature or veto.

Last May in a small town in eastern Utah, a 17-year-old girl, seven months
pregnant, paid a man she had just met $150 to beat her up in hopes of
inducing a miscarriage that would resolve her crisis. He obliged, taking her
to a basement and kicking her repeatedly in the stomach.

The fetus survived the assault and was born in August. The attacker went to
jail. And the girl, whose name was never released because she was under age,
became the center of a legal debate -- and the piece of legislation now
awaiting the governor's signature or veto. The bill would formally
criminalize what she did, that is, to seek an illegal abortion.

If it is signed into law by Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican, who has said
he agrees generally with its goals but is still studying the particulars,
Utah would still allow legal abortions performed by a doctor. But it would
go further than any other state, several legal experts said, in mapping out
a much murkier question: when is a woman criminally liable for trying to end
a pregnancy through other means or self-infliction?

The bill's sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican and former
police officer from the suburbs of Salt Lake City, said the beating case,
and the decision by a judge last fall that the girl had committed no crime
because seeking an abortion is not illegal, revealed "a loophole" in the
law.

"A woman going out to seek any way to kill her unborn child, no matter how
heinous or brutal, couldn't be held liable," Mr. Wimmer said.

But critics say legislation inspired by an unusual, perhaps even freakish
criminal case, could open up a vast frontier around the question of intent
and responsibility and give local prosecutors huge new powers to inquire
about a woman's intentions toward her unborn child.

For example, if a pregnant woman gets into a vehicle, goes on a wild ride
way over the speed limit without wearing a seatbelt and crashes and the
fetus is killed, is she a reckless driver? Or is she a reckless mother-to-be
who criminally ignored the safety of her fetus?

Under the bill, a woman guilty of criminal homicide of her fetus could be
punished by up to life in prison.

"So many things can happen, and it's all in the eye of the beholder --
that's what's very dangerous about this legislation," said Marina Lowe, the
legislative and policy counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union of
Utah, which has urged Mr. Herbert to veto the bill.

Some women's advocacy groups say the bill simply codifies what many states
are already doing, using existing laws about the unborn to prosecute
apparently errant mothers.

Just last month in Iowa, for example, a pregnant woman who fell down the
stairs at home confided to emergency workers that she was not sure she
really wanted to have her child. Though the woman did not immediately
miscarry from the fall, she was arrested anyway under a state law that makes
it a criminal act to harm a fetus. She was released after two days in jail,
and the charges were dropped.

At least 38 states have laws against fetal homicide, generally intended to
create additional penalties when a pregnant woman is assaulted or killed.
And two states, Delaware and New York, also have laws specifically making
self-abortion a crime. Both laws were passed before the United States
Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.

Some opponents of abortion also do not like the Utah bill because of the
very fact that it does codify the language and limits of abortion law, with
specific delineations about when ending a pregnancy in Utah is legal and
when it is not.

"Well, it's all right to kill a human being in this case, but not in this
case," said Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, a
national group that works for what it calls "pro-life concerns."

"I would urge him to not sign this law and to send it back," Mr. Sedlak
said, referring to Mr. Herbert. "He should ask the Legislature to address
the real problem of personhood in the womb."

Whether the bill, if it does become law, would be a rarely used symbolic
declaration or a widely used law enforcement tool is part of the debate as
well.

"Prosecutors have a lot of discretion, and miscarriage is a sad but common
event in connection with pregnancy," said Nancy Northup, president of the
Center for Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group for birth control
and abortion rights. "This bill would cast suspicion, potentially, on every
single miscarriage."

Nonsense, said Mr. Wimmer, the sponsor. He said the language in the bill
requiring "intentional, knowing or reckless" acts by a woman against her
unborn child sets a high bar that would allow questions to be asked only in
the most glaring of cases.

Behavior by a mother that might harm but not kill her fetus, including use
of alcohol or tobacco, would not be covered by the bill, he said. But, he
added, a mother who killed her fetus by taking illegal drugs might
conceivably be charged.

The 17-year-old girl's child, meanwhile, was adopted by a Utah couple.

Supporters of the bill said a letter from the baby's adoptive mother, read
aloud by Mr. Wimmer at a legislative hearing on the bill, was a powerful
emotional moment that may have swung some votes.

The bill was ultimately approved by overwhelming majorities in the
Republican-controlled Legislature: 59 to 12 in the House and 24 to 4 in the
Senate.

"When Representative Wimmer read the letter, about the little girl playing
with bubbles in the bathtub and learning to crawl and so full of life, you
could have heard a pin drop," said Laura Bunker, director of United Families
Utah, a group that worked on behalf of the bill. "And all of a sudden people
realized that there was a victim here, and the victim was alive and had a
future."

Lynn M. Paltrow, the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant
Women, a nonprofit group based in New York, said the focus on the child
obscured the bleak story of the teenager, who also deserves, she said,
empathy from the world, and the law.

"Almost nobody is speaking for her," Ms. Paltrow said. "Why
would a young
woman get to a point of such desperation that she would invite violence
against herself? Anybody that desperate is not going to be deterred by this
statute."



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