Court OKs Murder Conviction for Killing Fetus Before Viability
The highest criminal court in Texas has held that killing a fetus before viability can be prosecuted as murder.
The court ruled in the case of Terence Lawrence, convicted of double murder for shooting and killing his girlfriend, who had been pregnant for six weeks or less, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
The defendant, Terence Lawrence, had argued his murder conviction was unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade, which held the state has no compelling interest in prohibiting abortions before viability.
“The reasoning articulated in Roe and its progeny for affording substantive due process protection to the decision to have an abortion presupposes that the mother wants to have an abortion,” Judge Sharon Keller wrote in the opinion for the court. “The ‘compelling state interest’ test, along with the accompanying ‘viability’ threshold, has no application to a statute that prohibits a third party from causing the death of the woman’s unborn child against her will.”
A hat tip to How Appealing, which posted the story.
