In April 2005, Katrina Effert, age nineteen, secretly gave birth to a baby boy in the downstairs bathroom. She then strangled the child, wrapped him in towels, and dropped him over the backyard fence behind a neighbor\u2019s shed.<\/p>\n
After repeatedly lying to police and trying to pin the crime on a man she hooked up with nine months earlier, Effert finally confessed to killing the child, whom she named Rodney.<\/p>\n
In 2006 and again in 2009 juries convicted her of second-degree murder with a minimum of ten years in prison. Earlier this month the same judge who presided over Effert\u2019s trial in 2009 changed the conviction to infanticide and sentenced her to a three-year suspended sentence with probation.<\/p>\n
In England since 1922 and in Canada since 1948, infanticide has been separated from murder. Women who killed their newborns were often domestic servants who hid their pregnancies and destroyed the evidence for fear of being fired.<\/p>\n
Juries were unwilling to convict those women of murder since it carried the death penalty. Therefore, a new crime with a lesser penalty was created using the dubious assumption that only a mentally disturbed and, thus, morally irresponsible woman would kill her own child. Mental illness, remember, is the way that secular societies replace the judgmental \u201csin\u201d word.<\/p>\n
According to an article in Canada\u2019s National Post, when Justice Joanne Veit gave instructions to the jury in 2009, she told them that if they determined that Efferts was \u201cdisturbed\u201d \u2014 a word that has no clear legal or psychological definition \u2014 they had to find her guilty of infanticide. The jury nonetheless returned a verdict of murder.<\/p>\n
Now whether or not Veit should have overturned the jury\u2019s decision can be debated. What can\u2019t be debated was the judge\u2019s chilling rationale. Veit linked her leniency and Effert\u2019s crime to abortion.<\/p>\n
Canada, you see, has no restrictions on abortion. If Effert had had an abortion the day before she delivered, all would be well \u2014 legally at least. Instead she gave birth.<\/p>\n
As reported in the Calgary Herald, Veit wrote that the lack of a Canadian abortion law shows that \u201cmany Canadians … generally understand, accept and sympathize with\u201d hard-pressed mothers, \u201cespecially mothers without support.\u201d So, such sympathy makes infanticide permissible?<\/p>\n
Commentator Mark Steyn correctly states that the judge is, in essence, justifying \u201cfourth-trimester abortion.\u201d He goes on: \u201cSo a superior court judge in a relatively civilized jurisdiction is happy to extend the principles underlying legalized abortion in order to mitigate the killing of a legal person \u2014 that\u2019s to say, someone who has managed to make it to the post-fetal stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Dr. Al Mohler puts it, \u201cThe willingness to kill within the womb leads logically to a willingness to kill outside the womb.\u201d Of course it does \u2014 and don\u2019t let abortion supporters deny it. Princeton Professor Peter Singer has made that argument for years as a justification for killing infants.<\/p>\n
At least this case in Canada exposes where the evil logic of abortion leads. It is totally morally unsustainable.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s clear that despite the fact that more and more Americans at least are turning pro-life, the battle is far from over. We, that is, the Church, have a lot of work to do to uphold the dignity \u2014 and the sacredness \u2014 of every human life, from conception to natural death.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2011 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint with Chuck Colson” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In April 2005, Katrina Effert, age nineteen, secretly gave birth to a baby boy in the downstairs bathroom. She then strangled the child, wrapped him in towels, and dropped him over the backyard fence behind a neighbor\u2019s shed. After repeatedly lying to police and trying to pin the crime on a man she hooked up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[450,3539,661,1375,1227,3372],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7338"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}