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The Toll of Violent Anti-Abortion Speech
DEC. 1, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By KATHA POLLITT
HERE are some things abortion opponents have said about Robert L.
Dear Jr., the shooter accused of killing three and wounding nine at the Planned
Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs last Friday. He was just a lunatic. He
wasn’t attacking Planned Parenthood, he ran in there after trying to rob a bank.
My personal favorite, from the Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz:
He is reported to be a “transgendered leftist activist.”
Given that Mr. Dear is said to have told the police “no more baby parts,” could
the attack be related to the deceptively edited incendiary videos from the
anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, which purport to show that
Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit? Another Republican
presidential contender, Carly Fiorina, called it “typical left-wing tactics” to
connect them.
Who is she kidding? Since the videos appeared over the summer, there have been
four arsons at or near Planned Parenthood clinics. Abortion providers say
threats and harassment have increased as well. But then, disclaiming any
connection with violence has a long history in the anti-abortion movement. Black
Lives Matter activists are accused by some of promoting the murder of police
officers, and every Muslim on earth is seemingly expected to condemn jihadi
terrorism on practically a daily basis. Meanwhile, I’m not aware of any
prominent abortion opponents who have publicly accepted responsibility for
fomenting violence by using language that equates abortion with the Holocaust or
murder on an industrial scale — atrocities that would seem to call for
resistance by any means necessary.
In fact, even when deploring violence, opponents equate it with the practice of
abortion. As Mike Huckabee, who is also seeking the Republican presidential
nomination, said in the wake of the Colorado Springs shooting, “There’s no
excuse for killing other people, whether it’s happening inside the Planned
Parenthood headquarters, inside their clinics where many millions of babies die,
or whether it’s people attacking Planned Parenthood.” Millions of dead babies
versus “people attacking” a clinic? Which sounds like the greater evil to you?
Violence against abortion clinics and providers has been part of the so-called
pro-life movement virtually since 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v.
Wade that abortion is a constitutionally protected right. The National Abortion
Federation, the professional association of abortion providers, has recorded a
staggering 6,948 acts of violence against clinics and providers between 1977 and
2014, including eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings and 182 arsons.
Anti-abortion leaders portray violence as the doings of madmen, and probably
some of the perpetrators are indeed unstable. But when prominent voices in the
anti-abortion movement compare clinics to Auschwitz, when they equate embryos
with slaves, when Bill O’Reilly says that people feel fetal tissue donation is
“Nazi stuff” and Rush Limbaugh suggests the way to stop abortion is to “require
that each one occur with a gun,” it is not surprising that susceptible people
will act on what they hear as a call for violence.
Indeed, sometimes the call is explicit. The president of the anti-abortion group
Operation Rescue, Troy Newman, who serves on the board of the Center for Medical
Progress, views abortion as a capital crime and has called for the execution of
abortion providers. His second in command, Cheryl Sullenger, was convicted of
attempting to bomb a clinic. Has Mr. Newman been ostracized by mainstream
abortion opponents? Not really. Mr. Cruz, on his website, declares himself
“grateful” for Mr. Newman’s endorsement.
Law enforcement and the news media have been reluctant to call this continuing
violence by its rightful name: terrorism. Is it because the perpetrators are
generally white and Christian? Unless there’s a death, each incident gets little
attention. It’s as if we take abusive anti-abortion tactics for granted. Most
Americans probably have no idea how hostile anti-abortion “sidewalk counseling”
outside clinics can be. There’s a reason pro-choicers volunteer to escort
patients as they make their way past angry crowds to the clinic door.
Here is the dirty little secret about anti-abortion violence: It works. After
Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in 2009, his clinic, in Wichita, Kan.,
closed. (A new clinic opened in the same location in 2013, though it offers a
narrower range of services.) In Kalispell, Mont., the son of a prominent local
abortion opponent destroyed All Families Healthcare, the only abortion provider
in the area. It’s gone, too.
Most targeted clinics stay open, but there’s a toll. When I asked abortion
providers how the threat of violence had affected the way they provided care,
people listed everything from armed security guards and metal detectors to safe
rooms and regular emergency drills. Technicians have to decide whether a
patient’s elevated blood pressure is caused by a medical condition or from the
anxiety of wading through a crowd of protesters shouting, “The doctors aren’t
licensed!” and “You’ll die in there!” It can be hard to hire and keep staff when
the job description includes feeling threatened every day. As one provider
summed it up, “10 to 15 percent of our resources of time, talent and treasure
are devoted to compensating for harassment and threats.”
To abortion opponents that’s all good news. But what about the rest of us? A
majority of Americans, according to recent Pew data, believe abortion should be
legal in all or most cases. Do we want to live in a country where extremists use
violence to deny women legal health care, and people whose words may well spur
them to action insist they have nothing to do with it?
Katha Pollitt is a columnist at The Nation and the author, most
recently, of “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 2, 2015, on page A31 of the
New York edition with the headline:
The Roots of Anti-Abortion Violence.
The Toll of Violent Anti-Abortion Speech,
NYT,
DEC 1., 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/
opinion/the-toll-of-violent-anti-abortion-speech.html
Hunt for California Girl
Leads to a Body,
and a Neighbor, 15
JULY 29, 2015
The New York Times
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — At the edge of this coastal California town
known for its liberal bent and boardwalk amusement park is a cluster of big red
barnlike structures that was supposed to be a freewheeling utopia of its own.
Inside those buildings, once an old saddle leather tannery, now sits an artists’
colony, and the dyeing and drying rooms have given way to residential art spaces
with an egalitarian twist: They go mostly to lower-income artists who fill the
center with shows many nights, and its common spaces with their children, who
run and play as an all-ages posse.
But last week, the sense of the Tannery Arts Center as being a world apart
ended. A daylong search of the terrain around the center for a missing
8-year-old girl who lived there ended with the discovery of her body inside the
arts complex. On Wednesday a 15-year-old neighbor of hers was charged as an
adult with her murder and kidnapping, as well as sexual assault.
According to the police, the teenager, Adrian Jerry Gonzalez, known as A. J.,
lured the girl, Madyson Middleton, who was an acquaintance, into the apartment
where he lived with his mother. There, the authorities said, he sexually
assaulted the girl and killed her, before carrying her body downstairs and
discarding it in a recycling bin, where it was found Monday night by a Santa
Cruz police officer.
The authorities did not say what led them to Mr. Gonzalez, but said that he was
near the recycling bin when the body was found, that he was charged after
several hours of questioning by detectives, and that there was evidence tying
him to the killing.
Madyson had been missing since Sunday night, when a sole video camera near the
arts center’s parking area showed a glimpse of her about 5 p.m., said Kirby
Scudder, a resident and artist, who says he is dating her mother, an artist
named Laura Jordan.
Posters of the girl’s lightly freckled face went up on light posts across town
almost immediately after she disappeared, as did an impassioned online video of
her mother pleading for her safe return. A citywide search included
scent-tracking dogs patrolling the San Lorenzo River Levee beside the complex
and investigators looking into a homeless shelter across the road from the
artists’ colony. But the efforts ended right where they began, in the Tannery
center.
The Santa Cruz County district attorney, Jeffrey Rosell, did not answer
questions as to why Madyson was not discovered during the initial search of the
complex on Sunday. In a news release, Chief Kevin Vogel of the Santa Cruz Police
Department said that the second sweep was a “more thorough and focused canvass.”
He also has said that the police believed that Madyson was already dead by the
time the first missing-person call came in at 6:08 p.m. Sunday.
Mr. Gonzalez was among the oldest children of about 50 who made the complex,
which was established in 2009, their playground each day, Mr. Scudder said. All
ages routinely play together on the staircases and slim street that passes
between the landmark buildings, where the photographer Ansel Adams once shot
portraits of leatherworkers.
“They’re like a slow Internet,” Mr. Scudder said of the children, “you tell one
something, in minutes, every one of them knows.” Mr. Gonzalez was lower-energy
than the rest, Mr. Scudder said, but generally in command.
Images of Mr. Gonzalez, with his hair sometimes slicked back with pomade, were
posted on an Instagram account that appeared to be his. He was known for
entertaining visitors to the complex’s children’s summer camp, Camp Tannery
Arts. There, he would demonstrate his prodigious skills with a yo-yo, which he
never was without, according to several campers’ parents.
His mother, who has been raising him alone, is a home health care attendant, and
she left the apartment building soon after Mr. Gonzalez was taken in custody,
neighbors said; most of her family lives in the Philippines, several residents
said.
The police have given no motive for the attack, and it was not immediately clear
who was representing Mr. Gonzalez. Calls and messages to the Santa Cruz County
public defender were not answered on Wednesday.
In recent weeks, the Instagram account, which was taken offline Wednesday around
the time the charges against Mr. Gonzalez were announced, hinted darkly at his
life, with messages about his isolating himself from others to avoid an unnamed
consequence. “Wears all black to try and look powerful and hide the crippling
anxiety,” read one post. “Towards the future and the constant worry that I’ll
never find someone who loves me.”
The last post was on Sunday, the day Madyson disappeared, and includes a video
showing what appears to be Mr. Gonzalez playing a song by the band Tears for
Fears, “Mad World,” on a keyboard. Lyrics from the song’s refrain, “The dreams
in which I’m dying are the best I ever had,” were posted alongside the video.
The charges against Mr. Gonzalez, which include an allegation that he “engaged
in tying or binding of the victim,” carry a maximum penalty of life in prison if
he is convicted as an adult; because he is still a juvenile, however, he would
not qualify for the death penalty, the district attorney said.
Settoro Garcia, who said he was a friend of Mr. Gonzalez’s and Madyson’s
families, said that he saw the boy led away in handcuffs on Monday. Mr. Garcia
went to get Mr. Gonzalez’s mother, who, he said, fell to the floor and called
out, “I want my mommy.”
It was a painful coda to the search efforts, which had involved the entire
community, and during which Mr. Gonzalez showed increasing anxiousness. “He kept
asking for updates,” Mr. Garcia said. “I was like: ‘Dude, why do you keep asking
me? You’re the only one asking me.’ ”
Investigators carried full garbage bags from Mr. Gonzalez’s apartment from
Monday night until early Tuesday, Mr. Garcia said. The home is just a few steps
from where a memorial to Madyson has been steadily growing, filled with stuffed
unicorns, flowers and art.
Madyson was entranced by everything digital and dreamed of being an engineer,
said Mr. Scudder, her mother’s partner, and would fall asleep some nights over
her laptop. On Tuesday night, as her mother stood by the memorial in a long
dress, a little girl with brown hair walked up to her. Ms. Jordan knelt and
cried.
About a half-dozen young people gathered at the base of the town clock tower on
Mission Street to light candles and hold hands in prayer. “You can only hope
that she gets found,” said Jesse Fremouw, 20, who delivers furniture locally.
“So when it came out with what actually happened — it’s destroying.”
Correction: July 31, 2015
An article on Thursday about the arrest of Adrian Jerry Gonzalez in the death of
Madyson Middleton misstated the day on which a friend said he saw Mr. Gonzalez
led away in handcuffs. It was Monday, not Sunday.
A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Hunt for California Girl Leads to a Body,
and a Neighbor, 15.
Hunt for California Girl Leads to a Body, and a Neighbor, 15,
NYT, JULY 29, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/us/
boy-15-is-charged-with-murder-in-killing-of-madyson-middleton.html
Arrest Made in Washington Killings
MAY 21, 2015
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON — On a sunny Sunday afternoon in April, Savvas
Savopoulos, a wealthy iron company executive well known to this city’s elite,
gathered his family and friends in the backyard of his stately brick home to
grill lamb on a spit and celebrate Greek Orthodox Easter. It was, one guest
said, “an idyllic day.”
Now that house is a grisly murder scene. Mr. Savopoulos, his wife, 10-year-old
son and housekeeper were killed there last week in a case that has transfixed
Washington. Early Friday — after days of gruesome details dripped out in the
news media, including a report that the family had been held captive and the
child tortured — the police said they had arrested a suspect, Daron Wint, 34,
who once worked for the iron company.
Mr. Wint, of Lanham, Md., was arrested by members of the Capital Area Regional
Fugitive Task Force at 11 p.m. Thursday in Northeast Washington, almost 12 hours
after a news conference in which police said they were searching for him in
Brooklyn, where he has friends or relatives. He has been charged with
first-degree felony murder while armed.
Dave Oney, a spokesman for the United States Marshals Service, said that Mr.
Wint was taken into custody during a traffic stop on the 1000 block of Rhode
Island Avenue N.E. in Washington. He said that Mr. Wint was a passenger in the
car and that several other people riding in the vehicle were also taken into
custody, although he did not know if they had been arrested or charged with any
crime.
Court records show Mr. Wint has an arrest record in Maryland for offenses
including assault. The police here had appealed to the public for help finding
him, and had urged Mr. Wint to turn himself in.
Chief Cathy Lanier of the Metropolitan Police told reporters at the midday news
conference: “What we can tell you right now is that we do believe there is a
connection between this suspect in this case through the business. Right now it
does not appear that it was just a random crime.”
The deaths of Mr. Savopoulos, 46; his wife, Amy, 47; their son, Philip; and
housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa, 57, have shocked the nation’s capital since
their bodies were found inside the home on the afternoon of May 14.
The family’s house, an art-filled mansion located near embassies in one of the
finest neighborhoods in Washington, was set afire, and their blue Porsche 911
was found burned in a church parking lot in Maryland.
The deaths set in motion a police investigation that drew in the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Secret Service. Mayor Muriel
Bowser told reporters here that the team had been “working on this case 24/7” to
“find the perpetrators of this act of evil.”
Chief Lanier declined Thursday to discuss further details of the case or how the
suspect had been identified.
But The Washington Post, citing anonymous law enforcement officials and
documents related to the case, reported that the break came after the police
matched DNA from Mr. Wint to evidence found on the crust of a Domino’s pizza
that had been ordered to the home on the night of May 13. Police believe the
victims were being held captive inside, according to The Post.
There was no sign of forced entry at the home, the police said. The authorities
have not said much about how the victims were killed, other than that three
showed wounds consistent with blunt force or sharp objects. But various news
outlets have reported that the victims may have been bound and held captive, and
that the boy may have been tortured.
The police have not said whether they know the motive for the killings. But The
Post reported that on the morning of May 14, Mr. Savopoulos’s personal assistant
dropped off a package containing $40,000 in cash at the home. Hours later, the
home was set on fire. By the time firefighters arrived, the cash was gone, as
was the Porsche, and the family and housekeeper were dead.
Mr. Savopoulos was the president and chief executive of American Iron Works, a
company that supplies metals to large building projects across the region. He
and his wife were active in Washington social and charitable circles. Their son
attended the St. Albans School, an all-boys school next to the Washington
National Cathedral that has for decades educated sons of the city’s power
brokers, and is the alma mater of numerous Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Bushes and
Kennedys.
According to the website Zillow.com, the couple’s home, in fashionable Woodley
Park, not far from the official residence of the vice president, last sold in
2001 for $2.9 million; the family friend said it had been extensively renovated
and was worth far more than that. And, the friend said, the couple owned other
homes, including one on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Philip Savopoulos was in fourth grade at St. Albans. Friends say he traveled
around the country racing go-karts and was home from school, recovering from a
concussion, the day before the murders occurred. Parents say the campus has been
awash in grief; there have been regular services at the chapel for parents and
counselors and psychologists on hand for the students.
The couple also has two teenage daughters, who were away at boarding school at
the time of the killings. One is set to graduate from high school soon, a friend
said. Funeral services for the family are set for June 1 at Saint Sophia Greek
Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, across the street from St. Albans.
In addition to striking a deep nerve in the most elite circles of Washington,
the case has also raised soul-searching questions about why, when so many people
die violently in impoverished parts of the city, these murders have attracted so
much intense news coverage and discussion.
“It’s utterly horrifying and deeply chilling,” said Juleanna Glover, a corporate
consultant and onetime aide to prominent Republicans — including former
President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney — who was
acquainted with the couple.
“Those who live in Washington expect in an urban city, in an urban environment,
that there will be acts of violence,” she said. “But based on news reports, this
appears to be a long-term hostage situation that involved a child. And that’s
every mother’s nightmare.”
Al Baker and Marc Santora contributed reporting from New York. Kitty Bennett and
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on May 22, 2015, on page A14 of the
New York edition with the headline: Arrest Is Reported in Washington Killings.
Arrest Made in Washington Killings,
NYT, May 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/us/
dc-police-say-daron-dylon-wint-is-suspect-in-savopoulos-killings.html
Best,
Brightest — and Saddest?
APRIL 11, 2015
The New York
Times
SundayReview |
Op-Ed Columnist
PALO ALTO,
Calif. — I HAD heard about all of the dying, about all of the grief, and still I
didn’t immediately understand what I was seeing when, at a railroad crossing
here, I spotted a man in a blaring orange vest, the kind that road crews and
public-safety workers wear. He wasn’t carrying any equipment. He wasn’t engaged
in any obvious activity. He shuffled his feet, staring into the distance.
Hours later, at the same crossing: an orange-vested woman. Like the man, she
just stood there, without evident purpose.
“They’re on the lookout,” a friend of mine who lives here explained.
“For what?” I asked.
“Suicides,” my friend said.
Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by
stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo
Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more
sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a
“suicide contagion.”
And while mental health professionals are rightly careful not to oversimplify or
trivialize the psychic distress behind them by focusing on any one possible
factor, the contagion has prompted an emotional debate about the kinds of
pressures felt by high school students in epicenters of overachievement.
This is one such place. Children here grow up in the shadow of Stanford
University, which established a new precedent for exclusivity during the recent
admissions season, accepting just 5 percent of its applicants.
They grow up with parents who have scaled the pinnacles of their professions or
are determined to have their offspring do precisely that. They grow up with
advanced-placement classes galore, convinced that their futures hinge on perfect
SAT scores and preternatural grade-point averages. Experts on sleep are in keen
demand. The kids here don’t get enough of it.
But the situation isn’t so different in the Virginia suburbs of Washington,
D.C., where a separate cluster of teen suicides in recent years forced educators
and parents to re-examine the messages they give teenagers, intentionally and
unintentionally, about what’s expected of them and what’s needed to get ahead in
this world.
It’s not so different in Chicago’s western suburbs, where a high school teacher
recently pulled me aside and, in a pained whisper, insisted that the number of
advanced-placement classes that local students feel compelled to take and the
number of hospitalizations for depression rise in tandem.
These are to some extent problems of affluence and privilege. But they have
relevance beyond any one subset of our country’s populace. They reflect a status
consciousness that bedevils Americans at all income levels, and they underscore
an economic trepidation that is sadly widespread and is seemingly intensified by
the gaping divide between the haves and have-nots.
The suicide rate among all teenagers has seemingly risen a bit over the last
decade. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was 8.15
per every 100,000 Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 in 2013, the last year
for which complete data is available; the rate was 6.74 in 2003.
Many more children think about taking their own lives. According to a 2013
survey by the C.D.C., 17 percent of American high school students had considered
suicide in the previous year. Eight percent said they’d attempted it.
And suicide clusters have at least as much to do with imitation as with
environment, each instance of self-annihilation planting an idea and heightening
the possibility of the next.
There’s no direct line connecting the pressures of Palo Alto and the deaths. But
the community’s soul searching goes beyond those tragedies, to matters plenty
important in and of themselves. Are kids here getting to be kids? Does a brand
of hovering, exactingly prescriptive parenting put them in unforgiving boxes and
prevent them from finding their true selves and true grit?
“There’s something about childhood itself in Palo Alto and in communities like
Palo Alto that undermines the mental health and wellness of our children,” Julie
Lythcott-Haims told me.
Lythcott-Haims was a dean at Stanford from 2002 to 2012. She lives in Palo Alto.
Her two children, ages 13 and 15, go to school here. And she’s the author of a
new book, to be published in June, called “How to Raise an Adult.”
It reflects on the shortfalls of some modern parenting, which, in her view, can
be not only overprotective but overbearing, micromanaging the lives of children,
pointing them toward specific mile markers of achievement and denying them any
time to flail or room to fail. They wind up simultaneously frazzled and fragile.
“The suicides are tragic, but they are at the pointy head of the pyramid, the
tippy top,” she said. “Beneath them is a larger number of kids who are really
struggling and beneath them is an even larger number of kids who feel an amount
of stress and pressure that they shouldn’t be made to and that’s untenable.”
THE local media has been rife with commentary, from many perspectives, about the
mental health of Palo Alto teenagers.
Here is what Carolyn Walworth, a junior at Palo Alto High School, recently
wrote: “As I sit in my room staring at the list of colleges I’ve resolved to try
to get into, trying to determine my odds of getting into each, I can’t help but
feel desolate.”
She confessed to panic attacks in class, to menstrual periods missed as a result
of exhaustion. “We are not teenagers,” she added. “We are lifeless bodies in a
system that breeds competition, hatred, and discourages teamwork and genuine
learning.”
Adam Strassberg, a psychiatrist and the father of two Palo Alto teenagers, wrote
that while many Palo Alto parents are “wealthy and secure beyond imagining,”
they’re consumed by fear of losing that perch or failing to bequeath it to their
kids. “Maintaining and advancing insidiously high educational standards in our
children is a way to soothe this anxiety,” he said.
He made these observations apart from the suicides, for which, he emphasized,
“There is no single cause.” He recommended lightening children’s schedules,
limiting the number of times that they take the SAT, lessening the message that
it’s Stanford or bust.
“I will never be neutral on this issue,” he wrote. “The ‘Koala Dad’ is the far
better parent than the ‘Tiger Mom.’ ”
What he was saying — and what’s obvious, but warrants repeating — is that
ushering children toward a bright future means getting them there in one piece.
There’s a fresh awareness of that here, and perhaps a new receptiveness to some
words of his that should echo far beyond Palo Alto: “Want the best for your
child, not for your child to be the best.”
I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni
and join me on Facebook.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 12, 2015, on page SR3 of the
New York edition with the headline: Best, Brightest — and Saddest?.
Best,
Brightest — and Saddest?, NYT,
APRIL 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/
frank-bruni-best-brightest-and-saddest.html
Colorado Furor Erupts Over Charges Filed,
and Not Filed, in Grisly Attack
on Pregnant Woman
APRIL 3, 2015
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY
DENVER — It began with what one family called an unimaginable
loss: Michelle Wilkins, seven months pregnant and excited about becoming a
mother, showed up at the Northern Colorado home of a woman who had posted an
online advertisement selling baby clothes. There, the authorities say, the woman
beat and choked Ms. Wilkins and cut her fetus from her womb with a kitchen
knife.
But after prosecutors announced that they would not file murder charges in the
death of the fetus — a girl who would have been named Aurora — a politically
tinged furor erupted over how the legal system draws the boundaries between what
is life and what is not when pregnant women are victims of a crime.
The Catholic archbishop in Denver called the prosecutor’s decision not to file
murder charges a “travesty.” Small protests broke out denouncing the decision.
And Republican lawmakers said they would try to pass a law so that someone
suspected of causing the death of “an unborn member of the species” could be
charged with homicide.
Photo
Emergency medical workers at the scene of the attack in Longmont on March 18.
The authorities said Michelle Wilkins, who was seven months pregnant, was beaten
and had her fetus cut from her womb with a kitchen knife. Credit Matthew
Jonas/Longmont Times-Call, via Associated Press
While most states have fetal homicide laws on the books, Colorado is one of a
dozen where prosecutors must prove that a child had been born, and was alive
outside the mother, before they may charge someone with killing the child. That
was not the case here, said Stan Garnett, the Boulder County district attorney
who filed eight other charges against Dynel Lane, the woman accused of attacking
Ms. Wilkins.
“Many people in the community, and heaven knows I’ve heard from a lot of them,
would like me to have filed homicide charges,” Mr. Garnett said at a news
conference announcing charges of attempted murder, assault and unlawful
termination of a pregnancy in the March 18 attack. “However, that is not
possible under Colorado law without proof of a live birth.”
Voters in Colorado have overwhelmingly rejected three “personhood” measures that
sought to include the unborn as a person or child for legal purposes. Opponents
said the redefinition would have criminalized abortion and birth control, and
the measure last year failed to gain support of prominent Republicans like
Senator Cory Gardner, who was then a Senate candidate, or the party’s nominee
for governor, Bob Beauprez.
But the unfathomable crime against Ms. Wilkins, 26, in Longmont stunned people
across Colorado and the country, and has revived an emotional debate in heated
commentaries online and in the halls of the Capitol here, giving abortion
opponents what they hope will be an opportunity to change local criminal laws.
Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila released a pointed statement condemning what he
called a denial of justice and urging legislators to change the laws. In an
email interview, he said he had been struck by the “brutality and senselessness”
of the attack and felt compelled to weigh in.
“There were two victims, but one of the victims won’t receive justice,” he said.
“It doesn’t make sense, because we all know the joy and the hope mothers have
for their unborn children.”
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Bill Cadman, a Republican and the State Senate president, said the kind of
change lawmakers were thinking of “completely protects a women’s right to make a
choice about her own health.”
“If this isn’t a clear case of murder, nothing is,” Mr. Cadman said. “It’s not
debatable.”
But the effort to pass such a bill could face stiff opposition from Democrats,
who control one chamber of the legislature, as well as from reproductive-rights
supporters who fear such measures lay a path toward outlawing abortion or birth
control.
Democratic lawmakers here and a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky
Mountains said they could not comment on the Republican efforts because a bill
had not yet been introduced. But Democrats said the push for one was a rushed
reaction to a rare and horrible crime that could not be applied retroactively to
Ms. Wilkins’s case.
In 2013, Colorado lawmakers confronted the same question, and reached a
compromise law, the Crimes Against Pregnant Women Act, that has now been used in
nine cases, including this one. The law created a new felony category, “unlawful
termination of a pregnancy,” but did not satisfy those advocates who had called
for the state to adopt fetal homicide charges.
“The law is working,” said State Representative Mike Foote, a Democrat who was a
sponsor of the legislation.
Ms. Wilkins’s family is posting occasional updates about her condition on a
fund-raising website decorated with photographs taken during her pregnancy, in
which she smiled at her growing belly. The family has said it trusts the
criminal justice system, and is struggling to come to grips with the actions of
a “deranged woman.”
“We cannot begin to fathom the depths of depravity and evil which drove her
attacker,” her family said in a statement. “One life was ended and another was
scarred beyond imagination in this senseless act.”
The authorities say that after Ms. Lane, 34, attacked Ms. Wilkins, leaving her
covered in blood in the basement of her home, Ms. Lane told her husband she had
miscarried, and they went to the hospital with the fetus. Ms. Wilkins managed to
call rescuers to report the attack, and spent five days in the intensive care
unit, family members said.
Ms. Lane, a former nurse’s aide, is being held in the Boulder County jail in
lieu of a $2 million bond, and has not entered a plea.
Ms. Wilkins’s family has said she is with her partner, Dan, at a safe and
undisclosed location. They have so far declined interview requests, citing their
need for time, privacy and healing. But Ms. Wilkins did post a short note on her
fund-raising page last week, thanking people for their thoughts and prayers.
“Aurora is a light being now, nothing but ethereal joy and love,” she wrote.
“Forever in my heart.”
Colorado Furor Erupts Over Charges Filed,
and Not Filed, in
Grisly Attack on Pregnant Woman,
NYT,
APRIL 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/us/colorado-furor-erupts-over-charges-filed-and-not-filed-in-grisly-attack-on-pregnant-woman.html
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