This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Just last year the Supreme Court overturned the faulty Roe v. Wade abortion decision from 1973 and said since the Constitution does not contain that “right,” voters in the states could regulate it.
Now another stunning decision has been released.
This time, a state court has held that “someone who kills an unborn baby capable of living outside of the mother’s body can be charged with homicide since that child is considered a person under state law.”
That’s essentially the “personhood” theme that pro-lifers have been supporting for years already: the determination that the unborn is a “person” and therefore protected by the Constitution.
The ruling from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court limits that designation to those babies capable of living outside the mother, at this time.
Liberty Counsel explained, “In Commonwealth v. Ronchi, the highest state court in Massachusetts recently upheld two first-degree murder convictions of a man who stabbed his girlfriend to death which caused the death of their nine-month unborn child from loss of blood circulation from the mother.
“The defendant argued that since he had not actually stabbed the baby, he should not be held responsible for its death. However, the court rejected this argument and held that ‘infliction of prenatal injuries resulting in the death of a viable fetus, before or after it is born, is homicide.'”
The defendant had been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the crime.
The high court affirmed instructions to the jury that included, “Killing is not murder unless a human being has been killed. A viable fetus is a human being under the law of homicide. A fetus is viable when there is a reasonable likelihood of the fetus’s sustained survival outside the womb, with or without artificial support.”
The decision affirmed an earlier precedent in the state when in 1984 a driver was convicted of motor vehicle homicide when his vehicle struck a woman who was eight and a half months pregnant, and her child died.
Liberty Counsel reported, “The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court often used the word ‘child’ to refer to the unborn baby in last week’s ruling in Commonwealth v. Ronchi. Yet in a tragic irony, in the 1981 decision in Moe v. Secretary of Administration and Finance, the same court recognized a ‘fundamental right of choice’ when it comes to abortion, and that the state constitution ‘affords a greater degree of protection to the right’ than previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the time.”
That state now allows abortion through 24 weeks and after that under limited circumstances.
Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, said, “Abortion has distorted the law. It makes perfect sense to charge a person with murder who kills an unborn child. It makes no sense to call this ‘choice’ when the mother does the killing. Homicide can only be committed against a person – a human being. Homicide cannot be committed against property or a non-person. Plain and simple – abortion is homicide because the act of killing the child is the same whether it is done by a violent actor or a doctor in a white lab coat.”
