Say Anything Blog

LUFKIN, Texas -- The would-be teen mother arrived by ambulance last May, her belly bruised, the twin fetuses she carried for five months gone and her lips tightly sealed.

Authorities assumed 16-year-old Erica Basoria had been beaten and charged her boyfriend, 18-year-old Gerardo "Jerry" Flores, with murder under the state's new law protecting the unborn.

But it wasn't that simple. Basoria told authorities she had been trying to kill the fetuses for weeks and finally asked Flores to help by stepping on her stomach.

"When I was four months pregnant, I began to show, and at that time I decided that I should have gotten an abortion," Basoria wrote in an affidavit.

Although Flores faces prosecution, Basoria can't be charged because the new law - like many others across the nation - bans prosecution of mothers on the grounds that they have a legal right to end pregnancies. The case has attorneys on both sides questioning the fairness of a statute that considers one person's crime another person's constitutional right.

"How can two people conspire to do something like this and only one of them be punished? How can that be fair?" defense attorney Ryan Deaton asked.