Canadian appellate judges overturned a second-degree murder conviction of a woman who secretly gave birth to a baby boy in her parents’ house and then strangled him and threw his body over her neighbor’s fence. Convicted of the lesser charge of infanticide, the woman will not serve jail time for the crime.
Judge Joanne Veit, in her opinion on the case, likened the murder (or infanticide) to abortion to explain why the woman would receive a “suspended sentence”:
Mark Steyn at National Review Online pointed out the absurdity of using “onerous demands” to justify post-birth abortion, or “fourth trimester abortion,” as he put it:
Steyn also notes that the judge’s onerous demands argument could justify killing an elderly parent as easily as an unwanted but born child.
Another thing: why does the judge keep appealing to the feelings of Canadians in her decision? She runs a court of law, and it does not deny the pathos of the story to recognize that the feelings of the nation do not define justice in any case. After all, the feelings of the crowd can wrongly convict an innocent person. In this case, Canadian grief served as the justification for letting a woman twice-convicted of murder by a jury get away with “infanticide.”
The prosecution has asked the Canadian Supreme Court to review the decision.
