A teenager has been arrested on capital murder charges for murdering her newborn baby, but her defense is that she had no choice due to Texas laws protecting preborn children from abortion.
The girl, who has not been named, gave birth in September of 2021 and claimed the baby hit her head on the toilet after being born. But hospital staff at Cook Children’s Medical Center said the injuries weren’t consistent with a home birth or with being dropped. In the 911 call made by her sister, the girl could be heard screaming, “I don’t want it!” while her sister sobbed.
The county medical examiner’s office investigated and declared the manner of death to be homicide from blunt force injuries to the head. According to the autopsy, the baby girl — who was given the name Dayana — was battered so severely that her skull split open and her brain was lacerated by shards from pieces of the skull.
READ: Media uses tragedy of baby left in dumpster to condemn state’s abortion laws
Currently, the trial relating to the murder is taking place, and Fort Worth police Detective Christopher Parker read messages between the girl and the baby’s father relating to the baby, indicating that the plan all along was to kill her.
The father wrote [sic], “We gon have to kill it as much as I hate to say it.”
The girl wrote that she couldn’t wait for her stomach to be flat again, and then later, sent messages like “Ima kill this baby” and “I just wrap it in a towel and hit it.”
Prosecutors are asking for her to be given 40 years in prison for the crime. The boy has not been charged.
Though originally, the girl’s defense was that the baby’s death was accidental, she now is making a different claim: that she had to murder the baby because she couldn’t get an abortion. “A minor couldn’t get an abortion without parental consent, and even then, no one could get an abortion after 24 weeks,” defense attorney Lisa Herrick said in court. Herrick further tried to claim that the girl’s messages were related to abortion, not murder — although that doesn’t explain the message regarding putting the baby in a towel and hitting it.
The girl has since gotten pregnant with and delivered another child, and CPS has been involved to ensure that child’s safety. Noting that the girl has been cooperating well with CPS and has been a model prisoner in juvenile detention, Herrick asked, “What would the benefit of prison be?”
The idea that abortion laws have any bearing whatsoever on infanticide is ludicrous; women murder their babies regardless of what their local laws are. Just last month, for example, a newborn baby girl was rescued after being thrown into a dumpster in Hawaii — which has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the country.
National Safe Haven Alliance – Texas law
But perhaps most notably, there is no excuse for murdering or abandoning a newborn to die, when every single state has a Safe Haven law, allowing parents to surrender their children to first responders without penalty. In Texas, a child may be surrendered to authorities by parents up to 60 days after birth.
Additionally, the alleged reason for abortion is so a woman can have control over her “own body,” and even under that line of thinking, infanticide couldn’t be excused due to an inability to have an abortion. After all, once the baby is born, he or she is no longer residing within their mother’s body; it’s not an issue of bodily autonomy.
The jury is currently deliberating.
