A British man is on trial after authorities say he stabbed and killed his pregnant girlfriend because she wouldn’t have an abortion.
Filmon Andmichaen, 31, is said to have brutally murdered 26-year-old Liwam Bereket, who was six-months pregnant with their child. Andmichaen and Bereket were in a relationship, although Andmichaen was married to another woman. Doctors attempted an emergency c-section to save the baby after Bereket’s body was found, but the child was stillborn.
During the trial, prosecutor Sandip Patel said that Andmichaen had wanted an abortion so that his wife and children wouldn’t discover his affair. Patel called the murder “[a]n act that ended the life of an innocent woman and an unborn child she nourished within her. The facts are as simple as they are gruesome.”
He went on:
[Andmichaen] made a chilling decision. He decided that the life growing inside his girlfriend, a new, innocent life they created together, was a complication he was unwilling to accept. So he decided the simple solution to this problem was a permanent one. One of murder.
On the evening of August 1 last year the defendant took Liwam, his girlfriend, to a secluded spot they frequented. They went there to be alone and there he ended her life, and that of his unborn child, having cut her throat with a knife which he had brought with him. He left her grievously injured and alone. She was 26 and six months pregnant.
Homicide is the leading cause of death of pregnant women in the United States — though, as this story suggests, this threat is a global one. Like Bereket, many of these pregnant homicide victims die as a result of domestic violence situations. Recently there appears to have been an uptick in the number of news stories involving pregnant women who are killed because they have refused abortion.
Editor’s Note: If you are a victim of domestic violence, please visit thehotline.org or call 1-800-799-SAFE.
