Better Take Your Vitamin C, Or Pay The Price Of Murder!

South Dakota, like many other states has adopted numerous laws that seek to establish the unborn as full legal persons. For example, South Dakota has a feticide statute that makes the killing of an "unborn child" at any stage of prenatal development fetal homicide, manslaughter, or vehicular homicide as well as a law that requires doctors to tell women that an abortion ends the life of “a whole, separate, unique living human being.” The new law banning virtually all abortions states that it is based on the conclusion “that life begins at the time of conception,” and that “each human being is totally unique immediately at fertilization.”

If the unborn are legal persons, as numerous South Dakota laws assert, then a pregnant woman who has an abortion can be prosecuted as a murderer under already existing homicide laws.

Farfetched? Not at all. Prosecutors all over the country have been experimenting with this approach for years. In South Carolina, Regina McKnight is serving a 12-year sentence for homicide by child abuse. Why? Because she suffered an unintentional stillbirth. The prosecutors said she caused the stillbirth by using cocaine despite evidence that Ms. McKnight's stillbirth was caused by an infection.

Thus far, South Carolina is the only state whose courts have upheld the legitimacy of such prosecutions. But in fact, women in states across the country, including South Dakota, have already been arrested as child abusers or murderers—without any new legislation authorizing such arrests.

In Oklahoma, Teresa Hernandez is sitting in jail on first-degree murder charges for having suffered an unintentional stillbirth. In Utah, a woman was charged with murder based on the claim that she caused a stillbirth by refusing to have a c-section earlier in her pregnancy.

If women are now being arrested as murderers for having suffered unintentional stillbirths, one should assume that in South Dakota's post-Roe world intentional abortions would be punished just as seriously.

And we all know that South Dakota views places such as El Salvador (where there is no exception-not even to save the life of the mother) as a fetal utopia.
What's next? Adopting El Salvadore's brilliant tactic of providing state-sponsored Vagina Inspectors?

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/08/south_dakotas_new_murderers.php