A few weeks ago, women proud of destroying their unborn children started a #ShoutYourAbortion campaign on Twitter. The goal of the hashtag movement was to emphasize that exterminating one’s own flesh and blood need not be something a woman laments over or regrets.
Add that mother’s-choice-trumps–sanctity-of-life message to Planned Parenthood playing down the sale of born-alive baby organs and it’s easy to understand why, in the ultimate act of buyer’s remorse, mothers are tossing their children out of windows like common trash.
Take for instance, 21-year-old Rashida Chowdhury.
Ms. Chowdhury chose not to mitigate her guilt by signing a release form for Planned Parenthood to harvest her infant son Rizwan’s organs for sale. Instead, 20 days after his birth, at four o’clock in the morning, Rashida tossed Rizwan – dressed in a white and blue onesie – out of the fourth-floor bathroom window of her Richmond Hill apartment complex.
Clearly disturbed, Ms. Chowdhury believed that an evil spirit possessed the babe after he was recently hospitalized with a viral infection. So, to banish the demon and to ‘stop the pain,’ Chowdhury flung her son into a trash-strewn courtyard. An autopsy revealed that as a result of landing on the cement, Rizwan Ahmad died of blunt impact of the head and torso. Rizwan’s tiny skull was fractured and he also had lacerations of brain, liver and spleen.
Had Rizwan been aborted, he would have suffered similar lacerations and fractures. The only difference for Chowdhury is that, unlike the #ShoutYourAbortion group’s offspring or born-alive children whose hearts were stopped by clinicians eager to harvest their brains, this tiny boy lived outside the womb for three weeks.
For exercising choice after the expiration date, Rashida, who pled not guilty, was charged with second-degree murder and intentional murder of a victim less than 11-years-old.
The following month, former child services worker Jennifer Berry, 33, of Yonkers, also deferred her right to choose until after her daughter was outside the womb.
Jennifer changed her mind after giving birth in her boyfriend’s shower. With the baby’s umbilical cord still attached, the mother tossed her still-breathing daughter – together with the placenta – out of a seventh-floor window into the yard of her boyfriend’s Bronx apartment house.
Minutes after she threw the baby out the window, the child’s father, Giovanni Johnson, who didn’t know Jennifer was pregnant, found her bleeding in the shower. When he asked her if she was pregnant, she told him she’d had an abortion four months earlier. Maybe what Berry meant to say was “four seconds earlier.” Maybe she thought the murder she committed just seconds before Johnson found her in the shower was just a ‘later-than-late-term’ abortion.
Since then, investigators have been looking into the death of another one of Jennifer Berry’s children – a boy that allegedly died of SIDS in 2008 at just two and a half weeks old.
Notwithstanding, Berry told authorities that the 8-pound healthy baby girl she threw out the window was stillborn. But the autopsy report shows that, just like baby Rizwan, this baby girl was alive before she hit the pavement, and multiple blunt force injuries are what induced this tiny girl’s post-birth demise.
If only Jennifer – who like Rashida also pleaded not guilty – had visited Planned Parenthood a few weeks earlier, the baby’s death wouldn’t have been a homicide. Such an ample supply of fetal tissue would likely have inspired the abortion providers to accommodate her desire to terminate her pregnancy in a less dramatic way and Berry wouldn’t have been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter.
In the third such incident in New York since August, Fordham Heights section of the Bronx, 27-year-old mother of four/former day care worker Tenisha N. Fearon threw six-month-old Junilah Lawrence out of a sixth-floor window.
According to neighbor Lizette Rodriguez, prior to flinging the baby to her death, while standing naked in the window, a psychotic Tenisha #ShoutedHerDelayedAbortion to the gathering crowd, yelling, “Hallelujah, Praise God! I’m going to throw her. We’re all gonna die!” Despite people begging her, “Don’t throw the baby, don’t throw the baby,” after dangling her daughter out the window, Fearon let the child fall six stories to her death. On the pavement where she died, Junilah left behind one tiny shoe and a Mickey Mouse headband.
After being charged with murder and held without bail, a judge ordered Tenisha to undergo a psychiatric exam.
Planned Parenthood and #ShoutYourAbortion aside, two medical ethicists formerly associated with Oxford, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, have already argued in a Journal of Medical Ethics article that newborn babies outside the womb are just as “morally irrelevant” as those inside the womb and disposing of them after they are born is no different from terminating them prior to birth.
Minerva and Giubilini believe that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn)” should be permissible in all cases, whether or not the newborn is disabled. We can safely assume, however, that no one has yet ordered Minerva and Giubilini to undergo psychiatric exams.
Consequently, arguments for depriving the newborn of personhood are successfully blurring the line between pre- and post-birth abortion. That’s why in some circles, infanticide, or the disposal of “potential persons,” is now silently accepted by a slowly desensitizing culture as nothing more than a badly-timed belated abortion that women should still have the right to choose.
As a result, women with shrinking consciences, and especially the mentally unbalanced, are flushing babies down toilets, leaving their newborns in restroom garbage cans and at the curb in trash bags, and tossing their tiny infants out of windows.
