WINDSOR, Ontario, February 17, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – If the 26-year-old man accused of bludgeoning Windsor woman Cassandra Kraake, 31, to death in December is convicted, he will face punishment for but a single murder, though she carried an unborn child seven months along, already named Molly, who died also.
Fellow Windsorite Kim Badour thinks that is just plain wrong. She has started a petition on Change.org, called Molly Matters, asking Canadian legislators to pass a law making Bush’s crime a double murder.
“The accused Matthew Brush age 26 of LaSalle Ontario,” she wrote on the petition site, “known to the family of the victim will only be held accountable for one charge of murder Cassies. Her tiny baby girl whom i'm more then certain would have survived being born at 30 weeks gestation will receive absolutely no justice and this sickens me [sic].”
Badour’s petition, which has already found 4,575 supporters by late Friday, is directed at reviving and passing Bill C-484 from the 2008 House of Commons. Introduced by Alberta Conservative MP Ken Epp, it passed at second reading but was squelched by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, keeping his promise to steer clear of the abortion issue.
The pro-abortion movement attacked the bill then and is gearing up for a repeat performance, seeing Bill C-484—The Unborn Victims of Violent Crime—as part of an incremental strategy to undo the infamous 1988 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Morgentaler v. the Queen that gave Canada abortion-on-demand.
“Had this law [Bill C-484] been passed it would have made it a criminal offence,” Badour wrote on her petition appeal, to harm “a pre born child during the perpetration of an offence on the childs mother.”
One supporter identified herself as Cynthia MacPhee, a friend and co-worker of the murdered woman. “Cassie’s family is now without a daughter, sister, granddaughter and niece,” MacPhee wrote. “I know her family was close and I know that baby Molly was anticipated and loved. Her family lost two members not one that day.”
Mary-Ellen Douglas, spokeperson for Campaign Life Coalition, told LifeSiteNews that Badour’s and MacPhee’s reaction points to a place where heart and science agree, though the law does not. “Mothers know they’ve got a person in their womb. I did with my five children. I knew there was a person fluttering inside me from conception.”
But science teaches the same, said Douglas: “the other side claims the baby is part of the woman’s body but not one of mine had my blood type. One had a blood type so different he was incompatible with mine and had to have a transfusion.” The DNA of each child ever conceived is uniquely different from that of both parents from conception, she added.
Douglas hopes a pro-life MP will take up Bill C-484 but doesn’t give it much chance of passage. “Harper stopped it the first time,” she said, and there is no reason to believe he won’t do the same again. Nonetheless, she applauded Badour’s effort and believes it’s worth it. “It’s educating the people to the reality that the child in the womb is a person. In this society that is something people don’t want to deal with.”
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The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) opposed Bill C-484 then and still does, seeing it as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While it appeals to all concerned about violence against women, according to ARCC, it really targets women’s “reproductive rights.” ARCC’s Joyce Arthur told LifeSiteNews that 38 U.S. states (and the U.S. federal government) have passed unborn victims laws or other “fetal personhood” measures that have “resulted in hundreds of pregnant women with wanted pregnancies being arrested or prosecuted, or subjected to forced interventions, for behavior perceived as potentially harmful to the fetus.”
Arthur cites a study titled Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005: Implications for Women’s Legal Status and Public Health, and further studies by the same researchers, Lynn Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin. They count 780 instances since 1973 (380 of them since 2005) of women jailed or institutionalized by the courts either to get them off drugs during their “wanted” pregnancy or on suspicion they deliberately caused themselves to miscarry, but sometimes when women merely resisted doctors’ wishes that they deliver by caesarean section.
None of the laws used were intended to jail pregnant women, the researchers report, and about 10 percent of the arrests fell under unborn victims of crime laws.
Mary Ellen Douglas countered, however: “Joyce Arthur and her crowd will do anything to avoid talking about the 4 million unborn children that have been legally aborted in Canada. They can’t face that reality.”