Pro-Life Laws in Kentucky Helped a Mother Who Had an Abortion Get Away With Murder
In the days after Christmas, a woman in Kentucky named Melinda Spencer allegedly ordered abortion pills, used them to take the life of her preborn baby, and buried him in a shallow grave.
The facts of the case indeed indicate that Spencer allegedly murdered her baby, a son whose life was ended around twenty weeks gestation.
Pro-Life laws in Kentucky keeping abortion legal for women nevertheless forced prosecutors to drop the most significant charge against Spencer.
Spencer apparently told Kentucky State Police that she ordered the abortion pills online because the baby “was not her boyfriend’s, and she did not want him to find out she was pregnant with another man’s baby.”
The abortion pills resulted in a successful abortion. Spencer then found a light bulb box and placed her son inside before burying the makeshift coffin in her backyard.
Spencer initially faced charges of fetal homicide in the first degree, abuse of a corpse, concealing the birth of an infant, and tampering with physical evidence.
But prosecutors dropped the fetal homicide charge because Pro-Life laws in Kentucky, supported by groups like Kentucky Right to Life, exempt all women from prosecution for abortion. Spencer still faces the other three less significant charges.
The laws in Kentucky indeed say that fetal homicide charges shall not “apply to any acts of a pregnant woman that caused the death of her unborn child.” Spencer therefore cannot be held accountable for fetal homicide, even after she admitted to willfully murdering her preborn baby.
Kentucky Right to Life is the leading Pro-Life establishment group in the state, and they have been consistent defenders of the notion that women are always victims of abortion.
Christians in Kentucky have introduced at least two equal protection bills in recent years, which would have closed the loopholes in current law keeping abortion legal for women, and yet Kentucky Right to Life has opposed both efforts. They voiced concern that an equal protection bill would mean that women who willfully have abortions “would face criminal charges.”
Kentucky Right to Life executive director Addia Wuchner displayed a similar type of moral confusion when speaking about Spencer in recent days. Rather than calling for justice on behalf of the murdered preborn baby, Wuchner said that Spencer was likely “on her own, and that’s probably the greatest tragedy, and the other tragedy, of course, is that a child’s life was lost.”
In other words, Wuchner dismissed the murder of a preborn baby as “the other tragedy,” in comparison to “the greatest tragedy” of the alleged murderer not having company during the experience.
Pro-Life leaders like those at Kentucky Right to Life defend the legal ability of women to murder their preborn babies without any penalty, and once those murders are completed, they will direct their untethered empathy toward the mothers who commit the murders.
These laws support the murder of countless thousands of preborn babies every single year, especially in conservative states like Kentucky that some Pro-Life groups even insist are abortion-free.
There are some women who are meaningfully forced into abortions. But in the vast majority of cases, women who murder their preborn babies are willful initiators or participants in their abortions. This is especially true with abortion pills, which generally require women to become their own abortionists as they murder their preborn babies in convenience and anonymity.
Spencer is only one example of a serious phenomenon that the Pro-Life establishment has long overlooked. The insistence that women are categorical victims of abortion prevents preborn babies made in the image of God from receiving protection and justice.
Christians must continue to insist on equal protection of the laws for preborn babies and the criminalization of abortion as murder, which are the only ways abortion will be abolished. The bloodshed will only continue in the absence of such simple standards.
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