Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 17, 1994 TAG: 9405170065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Medium
The 6-1 decision will allow prosecutors to charge a defendant with murder for causing a pregnant woman to miscarry, even if her fetus had been only seven to eight weeks old and incapable of surviving outside her womb.
Activists on both sides of the abortion debate watched the case closely because it posed the moral issue of when life begins.
The court's decision gives California arguably the toughest fetal-murder law in the nation. It means a robber could be sentenced to death if he injured a pregnant woman and caused her to miscarry, even if he was unaware she was pregnant.
Prosecutors also may charge a defendant with multiple murder - a death penalty offense - for killing a woman whose fetus could not have lived outside her womb.
"The third-party killing of a fetus with malice aforethought is murder . . . as long as the state can show that the fetus has progressed beyond the embryonic stage of seven to eight weeks," Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas wrote.
Until now most California courts have interpreted state law to provide for murder charges only in the killing of a fetus capable of surviving outside the mother, generally not earlier than about 25 weeks.
Anti-abortion forces hailed the ruling. They said the decision underscored the seeming inconsistency of allowing a woman to abort her fetus whose killing would constitute murder if done by a third party.
Anne Kindt, executive director of the Right to Life League of Southern California, said, "This type of ruling says, hey, what is in the womb is a human being, a baby."
Abby Leibman, executive director of California Woman's Law Center, said the California Supreme Court has moved the law in a "very troubling direction" by paving the way for regulating the behavior of pregnant women.
by CNB