LUFKIN, Texas, March 4, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Texas teen is facing a capital murder charge after his 4-month-pregnant girlfriend persuaded him to step on her stomach in order to kill the unborn twins she was carrying. Authorities assumed 16-year-old Erica Basoria had been beaten by her boyfriend, 18-year-old Gerardo “Jerry” Flores, charging him under the Texas Prenatal Protection Act.
Basoria told authorities she had been trying to kill her unborn children for weeks, by punching herself in the abdomen. “When I was four months pregnant, I began to show, and at that time I decided that I should have gotten an abortion,” she wrote in an affidavit, as reported by twincities.com.
The Act, passed in 2003, was created as a protection for unborn children from assault, as in the new federal Unborn Victims of Violence act. The new law re-defined the legal term ‘individual’ as, “a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” The law, however, included language that makes it inapplicable in either a criminal prosecution or a civil action to the conduct of the unborn child’s mother so that the law would not apply to a woman having an abortion.
“How can two people conspire to do something like this and only one of them be punished? How can that be fair?” asked Ryan Deaton, defense attorney.
Prosecutor Clyde Herrington was shocked that “they completely leave the female out of the criminal penalty. It doesn’t seem entirely fair,” he said.
Basoria’s affidavit also said her parents tried to persuade her to have an abortion. “They said I was too young to have children,” she wrote. “About two weeks before the miscarriage, I started hitting myself,” she wrote. “I would do this every other day and I would use both of my fists when I did this. I would hit myself 10 or more times.”
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