Murder is murder

We tend, as a society (maybe as a species), to view crimes as particularly terrible when committed against certain kinds of people -- usually those we perceive as vulnerable* or (perhaps more to the point) 'innocent'.

For example, murder is pretty universally agreed to be a Bad Thing. Murdering a man is bad, but murdering a 'helpless' woman is worse. Murdering the elderly is worse yet, and murdering a child is beyond the pale.

These are emotional evaluations, of course. There's no cold, logical reason why some kinds of murder should seem worse than others** -- but then, the human species is not, typically, cold and logical.

So it's not really surprising that the murder of a pregnant woman should cause some strong emotional reactions. And one of the ways this emotion seems to express itself is through the call for charging the perpetrator with two murders -- the woman's and the "unborn baby's".

I understand the impulse, especially when it's late in the pregnancy, especially when it was a wanted pregnancy, especially on the part of the family (who are, after all, mourning not only the woman they love, but also the potential future family they'd been expecting and preparing to welcome). But this is an impulse that must absolutely not be codified into law.

The problem is, as soon as you create a crime called 'fetal murder', you open the door to all kinds of issues. As outlined in this National Post article:

"If we take the position that the fetus is a separate person at viability, then we open up all sorts of issues. All of a sudden, the woman is two separate persons," said Martha Shaffer, an associate law professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in family and criminal law. "Her liberty and autonomy can be greatly curtailed in the interests of the fetus within her.

"If she's doing something that somebody decides to be contrary to the fetus's interests -- which could be eating too much sugar, exercising too hard, smoking or drinking -- it's very dangerous to go down that route to say a woman is no longer a separate, independent person at a certain stage of pregnancy.

In other words, a woman who miscarries after doing something her in-laws don't approve of could find herself in serious trouble.

That's not even touching the abortion issue, which is, of course, very much a part of the debate. It may not be what Aysun Sesen's parents are thinking when they say they want double murder charges, but you can bet it's what the political activists who have picked up this cause are thinking about.

Ultimately, I don't think the problem is that we attach insufficient value to fetuses.

IMNSHO, I think the problem is that we attach insufficient value to living, breathing, human beings. We need to value women for themselves, and acknowledge that the murder of a woman is terrible because it ends a woman's life, not only because it happens to end a pregnancy as well.

On that note, it was nice to see the Globe and Mail taking a slightly different tack on the case and at least touching on the issue of violence against women instead of so-called fetal rights.


*Although certainly not always -- crimes against the socially marginalized being Counter-Example A.
** I suppose you could construct an argument about the loss of a child's potential, but it's hard to claim logically that murder is a crime against future potential weighted by life expentancy, rather than a crime against the actual person in question.