A Catholic state legislator in Texas has introduced shocking new legislation that would effectively reduce infanticide to a fineable offense for the first 12 months of a baby’s life. The bill states that if a mother kills her own child within the child’s first 12 months of life due to past partum depression, the murder would be downgraded and punishable by relatively short jail stay and/or a fine.
The bill, according to the House Committee Report, would
amend the Penal Code relating to the punishment stage of a trial in which a defendant is guilty of causing the death of a child; the defendant may raise the issue of impairment under certain conditions. If the defendant proves the issue in the affirmative by a preponderance of the evidence, the offense would be punishable as a state jail felony…A state jail felony is punishable by confinement in a state jail for any term of not more than two years or less than 180 days, or, in addition to confinement, a fine not to exceed $10,000.
So killing a baby in Texas could be punishable by a fine not to exceed $10,000? All the mother has to do is show signs of post-partum depression as the reason for the murder.
Not to belittle post-partum depression which I’ve seen can have terrible effects on women and families but this bill, should it become law, would have disastrous consequences for children.
Here’s the text of the bill which is online here:
(e) At the punishment stage of a trial in which a defendant has been found guilty of causing the death of a child to whom the defendant gave birth within the 12-month period preceding the child’s death, the defendant may raise the issue as to whether the defendant caused the child’s death because the defendant’s judgment was impaired as a result of the effects of giving birth or the effects of lactation following the birth. If the defendant proves the issue in the affirmative by a preponderance of the evidence, the offense is a state jail felony.
That takes infanticide out of the realm of murder and into a felony punishable at a lesser punishment of relatively short jail time and a fine.
Who introduced such a bill? Blogger Cassy Fiano writes:
Of course, leave it to a rabid pro-abortionist like Jessica Ferrar to see otherwise. She’s a Texas state representative, recently honored by Planned Parenthood and the proud owner of a 100% NARAL approval rating. She’s currently trying to force through a bill that would make Catholic hospitals be required to dispense the morning-after pill. Her latest bright idea? To decriminalize infanticide. Introducing Texas HB 3318, the first of its kind in the entire country, known as “the infanticide bill”…
This bill was passed by the Texas State Criminal Jurisprudence Committee 7 to 1 on April 28th. It’s currently on the way to the Calendars Committee.
Farrar, who introduced the legislation, writes about the bill here.
This bill must be defeated in Texas because its success will only be copied in other states. Below are the phone numbers of the members of the Calendar Committee, according to Fiano.
Brian McCall-Chair: 512-463-0594
Eddie Lucio-Vice Chair: 512-463-0606
Norma Chavez: 512-463-0622
Garnett Coleman: 512-463-0524
Byron Cook: 512-463-0730
Brandon Creighton: 512-463-0726
Charlie Geren: 512-463-0610
Jim Keffer: 512-463-0656
Lois Kolkhorst: 512-463-0600
Edmund Kuempel: 512-463-0602
Jim McReynolds: 512-463-0490
Alan Ritter: 512-463-0706
Burt Solomons: 512-463-0478
May 6, 2009 at 1:08 am
Well, folks here we are sliding quickly down that “slippery slope”! Should we be shocked or surprised at this turn if events? No. When the first child was murdered in the womb with sanction of our government, we were doomed.
Why wouldn’t we think that the killing with approval would never move beyond the womb?
We have learned NOTHING from Nazi Germany and similar reqimes that took this route for the “people”.
The saddest thing besides the innocent children in and outside of the womb that mothers will be encouraged to kill by our legislators is that this representative is Catholic.
If the Bishops had done their job before this past year and I mean ALL of the Bishops, this wouldn’t have gotten this far.
The blood of these children are on all who participate i or look the other way when their innocent lives are snuffed out.
May 6, 2009 at 1:47 am
This bill has it’s genesis in the Andrea Yates and Deanna Schlosser (sp?) cases. Both of these women were flat nuts when they committed their acts. Yates killed all five of her kids, Schlosser cut off the arms of her infant daughter. Both were off their prescription meds at the time, the postpartum depression claim is only a red herring (IMHO).
Since then anything that comes out about Yates speaks of her constant remorse and sorrow. Although for economic reasons her husband divorced her he continues to stand by and support her. I don’t know much about the Schlosser case other than her husband left after this.
I can’t think of any worse Hell than to come back to planet Earth only to discover you’d killed your own kids when you’d gone off your meds.
Having said all that, only a proabort, soulless harpie could try to minimize something of this nature.
May 6, 2009 at 2:41 am
The voters in that district shoulder a special moral responsibility to oust that person from public office.
May 6, 2009 at 11:16 am
Just a quick point here: you will never DETER a mother with PPD from killing her baby. PPD is a sickness/mental illness/chemical imballance of the brain. No mother chooses to have it. It is a lose-lose situation, especially when there are other children in the family involved.
May 6, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Good points, especially Deusdonat. I’d only like to add that this proposal, besides its immorality, is unnecessary. There are already provisions to consider the state of mind and mental capacity of the accused.
Further, I seem to recall that in a criminal trial the burden of proof is “beyond reasonable doubt,” not “preponderance of the evidence,” which is a civil standard. Since this is a criminal proceeding shouldn’t the standard be higher? Or, since it’s the defense, do they only need to meet the lower standard to overthrow the prosecution’s burden of proof? Anyone here a lawyer who can answer that?
May 6, 2009 at 3:20 pm
On behalf of Texas, I heartily apologize.
I assure you folks, this won’t happen again.
May 6, 2009 at 7:00 pm
If I’m reading that excerpt right, then it doesn’t say PPD or even Post-Postpartum Psychosis, it says “from the effects of giving birth or the effects lactation”, which to me would seem to apply to any situation… no formal diagnosis necessary.
Infanticide occurs most often in cases of post-partum psychosis, which is fairly rare, so a bill like this seems doubly unnecessary, as allowances are typically made for mental illness in any murder case.
I also find it very interesting that lactation is singled out here, as women who breastfeed are less likely to suffer from PPD than bottle feeding mothers.
Just another liberal feminist minded piece of tripe. ‘Ah, the horrors of being a woman and having to endure carrying, giving birth and feeding babies… evil babies that take over our bodies and make us do crazy things. We need special treatment, I mean equal…er, laws that will correct the inequalities foisted on us by the patriarchal society.’
May 6, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Dear Deusdonat,
I must most emphatically disagree with your statement, which I think is both uninformed and dangerous.
I have been suffering for several years from sever periods of clinical depression (slowly recovering). What kept me more than once from taking my life was the fear of Hell – don’t talk to me about the ineffectiveness of deterrents. Mental disease usually greatly reduces one’s judgment/culpability, rather than overriding it completely. Of course one does not directly choose mental illness, but one still has a margin of choice within it, which is often one’s best grip on sanity. A deterrent, moral and/or legal, is a strong safety rail for those with such impaired judgment. What comfort is it to a mother having killed her own child in a mental breakdown that she may not have been responsible?
I know you have no evil intentions, but your kindness is in effect cruel and does great harm to those who need help the most. Please understand this!
May 6, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Anon – I agree that the law ought not to be changed, but (begging your pardon) the threat of Hell is by definition a deterrent the State cannot employ. They can lock people away or execute them or what have you, but they have no power over the soul.
I’m grateful for your continued recovery and pray for God’s peace and joy to be with you always.
May 6, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Even severe clinical depression, awful as it is, is not psychosis.
In psychosis the perception of reality is altered. Not just so as to appear dark and hopeless as in depression. One may believe that he-or she-has received messages from God, or from the Devil, or from aliens. One may believe these messages say the child is evil and belongs to the devil, or that the child is threatened by evil and can only be saved by being sent back to God, etc etc.
I once spoke to a women in a mental hospital, one who seemed so not crazy that all of us students thought she worked there or was on staff in some capacity. It turned out that, under a lot of stress and the use of drugs to stay awake to work and go to nursing school and take care of her kids, she had blacked out and killed her 4 kids with a knife, came to sitting on the stairs to her mother’s house covered with blood not remembering what had happened. She had spent 16 years in mental hospitals after that. She still had trouble admitting that she had done that, although she acknowledged that she had done it, she would say things like “I don’t know why my children had to die.” (My instructor checked with the hospital and the story was true. In fact I remembered reading about it in the newspaper years ago.)
People sometimes are genuinely not responsible for what they do when psychotic. Post partum psychosis is rare but does exist. But what needs to be done is for Texas to amend its law such that there is more emphasis on diminished responsiblity due to mental illness in all cases, including broad sentencing leeway for the judge, so that even if the jury in their ignorance
thinks mental illness is a lot of hooha, the judge can give a lenient sentence, or sentence to a mental health facility.
There are problems with such laws, in that in a way all crime can be considered mental illness, antisocial personality disorder.
Perhaps the law needs to specify psychosis. What it should not do is apply only to infanticide.
And how ridiculous to say “because of birth or lactation” as if these were so awful that by themselves they could lead to murder!
Susan Peterson
May 7, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Just my two cents.
First of all, the law itself is horrifying in its ramifications. Clearly, everyone here already knows that.
I’m not in Texas right now, but I have been dealing with periods of PPD. And so far all the folks that I’ve talked to (my OB, his nurse, a midwife, etc.) have all been ready to just take my word for it and assign meds without really asking questions. What this law in effect, then, would do, is cause any woman to be able to kill her child without serious consequences. It is exactly like the wink-wink-nudge-nudge “I need an abortion because this pregnancy is bad for my health” abortion excuse.
God help us all.
May 7, 2009 at 9:27 pm
For some time now, I have pointed to the disparity in the way society treats mothers who murder their newborns (or even just abandon them, as in the case of ignorant teenage moms, quite often) vs. how society views abortion. It has seemed strange to me how we vilify a young, scared unwed mother who abandons a child, yet are strangely silent about a woman choosing (for any reason) to abort her baby.
I don’t think mothers should be allowed to murder their children at any age. But, rather than looking at this disparity and taking a harder look at the inherent evil of abortion, we instead decriminalize killing the murder of a newborn child???
It is a crazy world we live in, folks.
May 8, 2009 at 6:34 am
(same as from 2:23pm)
– Nightfly, thank you for your wishes.
To clarify, I never said the state should employ the fear of Hell. I merely stated the parallel to show that appropriate deterrents can do much good. Of course there is a distinction between depression and psychosis, but there is also a continuum. All those people who have less than fully lost their perceptive capacities will greatly benefit from legal and/or moral deterrents, if they are made properly.
– Ivschant, you make a good point, but I don’t exactly agree with your use of the word ‘vilify’. To legally punish is not necessarily to vilify. Society may judge external actions and protect people from each other (and sometimes themselves) without making a moral judgment about the person’s soul. I do not intend to ‘vilify’ either aborting mothers or those who would kill their child in a state of psychosis. The law is there to protect the children, and also, perhaps, to help the woman resist a very self-destructive choice.
Of course there are people who are in deep psychosis, but this will be a tragedy whatever you do. You cannot just destroy the rule of law just to accommodate these people, because it will hurt a much greater number as a consequence. Law cannot solve all problems. It is usually wiser to legislate for the good of the majority.