If only Medea Lived Today
In Canada, a young mother kills her newborn baby by strangling it with her underwear, and throws it over the fence into a neighbor’s yard. The judge on appeal overturns a conviction for second degree murder, reducing the sentence to a three year sentence suspended, and based her ruling on the fact that since Canada does not outlaw abortion, this means that Canadians accept that unwanted pregnancy is onerous.
The child’s name was Rodney.
Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit rejected the Crown’s call for a four-year prison term.
The fact that Canada has no abortion laws reflects that “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childrbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support,” she writes.
The judge noted that infanticide laws and sentencing guidelines were not altered when the government made many changes to the Criminal Code in 2005, which she says shows that Canadians view the law as a “fair compromise of all the interests involved.”
“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.”
I am not sure what the ‘without support’ here means. Other news reports say that teenagers was living with her parents at the time.
http://www.wetaskiwintimes.com/PrintArticle.aspx?e=3292751
Veit said there are many mitigating factors, including Effert’s youth, her lack of a prior criminal record, her remorse and her pro-social lifestyle since the killing.
Effert had been sentenced to life in prison in 2009 after earlier being convicted by a jury of second-degree murder for strangling her newborn son, later named Rodney, with a pair of orange thong underwear and tossing his body over a fence into a neighbour’s yard in April 2005.
However, the Court of Appeal of Alberta quashed the conviction in May, ruling the jury’s verdict was “unreasonable,” and substituted a conviction of infanticide.
It was the second time Effert was convicted of second-degree murder by a jury in the newborn’s death. In 2006, a Wetaskiwin jury found her guilty, but a new trial was ordered because jurors were given flawed instructions.
My comment: The article reports that the applicable law against infanticide imposes a maximum penalty of five years.
What I note in particular is the language and reasoning quoted from the mouth of the appellate Judge: in effect, she argues that legalizing abortion is tantamount to sympathizing with the difficulties of motherhood, and that sympathy for motherhood leads the court of law to sympathize, not with the child, but with the mother who killed him rather than nurse him.
Since I just spent five years adopting a child, traveling to another hemisphere and overcoming considerable difficulties to do so, I can report that merely leaving the baby on the steps of a Church may have been kinder to the adoptive parents than strangulation, and certainly kinder to the child.
What we are witnessing is a manifestation of the modern mind, which delights in sympathizing with the unsympathetic, and sparing no pity for the weak. It is the same mindset that instinctively sides with terrorists over Jews, enemies over neighbors, Communists over CIA, criminals over cops, and so on.
I assume (and this is mere speculation on my part) that the modern mindset springs from an attempt to be more Christian than Christ, but without the necessity of bearing any sort of a cross. Such cheap moral superiority is an intoxicant, uplifting the giddy ego while it darkens the intellect. We have been seeing for decades now the results when cheap moral superiority becomes the consensus among the leaders and opinion-makers of our civilization. It is almost like Gresham’s Law in economics: bad moral currency drives out good.
Other commentators on the case note that Michael Vick received 23 months in jail for participating in dog fighting.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
