SUFFOLK -- A judge dismissed on Monday charges against a 22-year-old pregnant Suffolk woman who shot herself in the stomach to abort her unborn child.
If the case had gone forward, it would have been the first time that a woman would have been tried in Virginia for aborting her own baby.
Tammy Skinner - scheduled to give birth to her third daughter on the day of the shooting - called 911 early Feb. 23 from a downtown parking lot and told the dispatcher that someone shot her. . . .
During the investigation, a neighbor said Skinner was at the neighbor's apartment about 3 a.m. the day of the shooting. Skinner called 911 about an hour later from a parking lot. Officers found a red stain on the driver's seat in her car, a .22-caliber gun and a magazine with three bullets, a search warrant indicated. The abortion charge turned into a legal headache for prosecutors because Virginia's statute has remained untested for nearly 50 years. Skinner's lawyer, Kevin E. Martingayle, argued on Monday that in two similar Florida and Georgia cases, the courts sided with mothers who shot themselves and aborted their children.
In the Florida case, an unwed teenager about 26 weeks pregnant shot herself in 1994. Her baby lived for 15 days. The state Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that a pregnant woman couldn't be held criminally liable for killing her fetus.
Of course, if it were really the unborn child's father who shot this woman in the stomach to terminate her pregnancy, whether it were with the mother's consent or not, he would be in jail facing some very serious criminal charges. In Texas a kid got life in prison after helping his girlfriend kill their unborn child by walking on her stomach. The girl got off scott free, because she has a "right" to an abortion.
This is the ludicrous state of abortion law in this country. If the mother doesn't want an unborn child the child itself is considered a "clump of cells" that can and should be destroyed and vacuumed out of the mother's womb. If the mother wants a child, however, that "clump of cells" magically turns into a human being with protection under the law.
It makes absolutely no sense.