A top court in
Massachusetts
found Tuesday that
personhood rights
extend to a fetus when it is killed as a result of the homicide of a pregnant woman.
Justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found that even when someone does not directly injure a fetus when they kill a pregnant woman, the appropriate charges should amount to a double homicide.
The case stems from a jury decision that found defendant Peter Ronchi guilty of the first-degree murder of his girlfriend and her full-term fetus in 2009, which resulted in consecutive life sentences for the defendant.
FETAL PERSONHOOD IS THE NEXT LEGAL FRONT LINE FOR THE ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT
Ronchi asked the state’s top court to reverse those convictions based partially on his argument that it should not be up to the court to determine “at what point, if ever, a fetus attains personhood for the purposes of the law of homicide,” according to his legal
brief
.
But the court ultimately disagreed with Ronchi’s argument Tuesday after he claimed the fetus’s death was a result of its mother’s loss of blood.
“The defendant’s contention that the fetus was uninjured by the stabbing of Galperina is strained at best. Admittedly, none of the fifteen stab wounds was inflicted on or touched the fetus,” the 46-page
judgment
reads.
“By ending the mother’s life, he destroyed the viable fetus through the cessation of life-sustaining maternal blood flow,” the court ruling added.
Through its decision, the court affirmed the jury’s convictions and declined to overturn precedent set in the 1984 case
Commonwealth v. Cass
, which found that a viable fetus is a person in the context of vehicular homicide.
The justices also wrote that they have sole jurisdiction to apply the “common-law definition of murder” and that the Cass precedent doesn’t exceed the judiciary’s authority.
Tuesday’s decision comes as the
Supreme Court
has created inroads for the anti-abortion movement following its summer decision in
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
, which overturned nearly five decades of precedent under
Roe v. Wade
by allowing states to set strict limits on abortion procedures.
“A fetus is either worthless and discardable or a unique human life worthy of joyful celebration. It can’t be both,” Tyler Rowley, president of Servants of Christ for Life, told the Washington Examiner last month ahead of the annual
March for Life
in Washington, D.C., which gathers once a year to voice opposition against abortion. “In the same way, fetal homicide is either a horrendous crime, or it’s no worse than what abortionists do every day.”
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But while advocates against abortion may seek to further limit such procedures, the high court has signaled it’s not yet ready to take on a case with even higher stakes than Dobbs.
In October last year, a petition for a case that sought to answer whether fetuses are entitled to constitutional rights
failed to garner
four justices, or the necessary number of votes, in order to approve the case for consideration.
