What's in a name?
I've been following a story in the news this week about a woman who murdered another woman in order to take the murder victim's unborn child. The baby girl was found at the murderer's home and was being passed off as her child.
I can't imagine what the murdered woman's husband and family are going through right now. You can read the details of the story at the linked articles. Needless to say it's very graphic and horrifying and you will be stunned by the pure evil a human being can inflict upon others.
What also caught my attention during the course of this story were two other related issues. First off, "a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause." . The article goes on to state that, suprisingly, very little research has been done in this area and there is corresponding lack of media attention. Though, the murder of Laci Peterson by her husband, Scott, is probably the most recently infamous example of this.
The second, and just as complex issue, has been the way the media seems to be struggling as to how to 'label' the crime committed and the resulting 'kidnapped baby'. The tag line for this story on Fox News is "An infant girl who was cut from her strangled mother's womb..." , yet the headline for the story is "Suspect in Stolen Fetus Case to Be Arraigned" . Well, which is it? Is it a stolen fetus or a kidnapped baby girl? Is it the same? What's the difference? If there is, what makes the difference? This sentence from the same article seems to be contradicting itself. "Montgomery, 36, confessed to strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas."
And I'm not picking on Fox News. You can read similar AP stories on CNN.com and MSNBC.com . The article at CNN also jumps back in forth in the sense that it uses the terms 'fetus', 'infant' and 'baby' interchangablely, but the MSNBC article only uses the terms 'baby' and 'child'. In the very least, it points out there is some confusion (?) over what term is appropriate and how/when it is applied.
Just to add fuel to the fire, it's also interesting to note that "Montgomery faces a federal charge of kidnapping resulting in death". In this case the mother died, but the baby lived. Would the murderer have faced the same charges if the baby died and the mother lived?
Just something to think about. I'm curious as to what opinion other people come away with from this.
Comments
This sentence from the same article seems to be contradicting itself. "Montgomery, 36, confessed to strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas."
Actually, that sentence is medically correct. A fetus receives oxygen through the umbilical cord and cannot breathe independently. A baby uses lungs to breathe. So when the poor thing was cut out of her mother's stomach, she was still a fetus. After she took her first breath, she was a baby.
Posted by: Rivka | December 20, 2004 7:03 PM
First: Unspeakably. Horrible. Crime.
second: how the heck can a husband a) think his wife is pregnant when she isn't, and b) just had a baby, when she hadn't!!! He ought to be shot right after his wife. Either he was in on it, or just too stupid to live.
I looked up the different terms used. Way easier than thinking about this incident. Lethal injection seems to easy.
As the definitions below show, the terms below can all be used in this story, but some only apply to the earlier part of the crime, and others only after the crime was complete. How about gas chamber built for two?
Bottom line: writers hate repetition. they probably used a thesaurus to come up with different words to use. The nuances of the different terms is probably not considered, with the exception of a writer's / publisher's preference for either fetus or unborn child.
Fetus is the medical term for the period 8 weeks after conception until birth. Or "baby still inside mother."
Unborn child isn't in the dictionary, but is probably the same thing, although I assume it's developed enough to survive outside the mother.
child is between birth and puberty. Hmmm. The second definition includes unborn infants. Making "unborn child" a redundant term.
infant is a young child.
baby is a very young child.
Electric chair?
Posted by: DanB | December 22, 2004 10:27 AM
I hate to just say "me too" (like some brain-dead AOL-er) but by the time I read this post, the other two replies were already here. So I'll say what I was going to say anyway.
I think the interchangeable use of "fetus" and "baby" are a question of referring to the little girl in her in-utero state (fetus, before her mother's murder) and her post-murder state of separation from her mother's body. Either way, it's disgusting.
No one seems to remember a similar crime just a few short years ago, here in Chicago. I believe in that instance, three people killed a woman and cut the baby from the womb, subsequently attempting to pass it off is a newborn child to one of the women in the group.
Now Dan asked how the husband in this case could believe his wife actually bore this child... well, I recall seeing on one of the news reports that she had recently been pregnant but "lost the baby" and never told her husband about the loss (miscarriage? I don't recall). She may have still looked pregant enough (or faked it well enough) to pass this off as the natural outcome of her pregnancy. I don't know.
It's scary to think anyone is capable of such planning and (no pun intended) execution of a crime as grisly, disgusting, and inhuman as this... but history has shown that there's just about nothing so awful that a human won't do it, given enough incentive, desire, and insensitivity.
- Mike
Posted by: Mike | January 2, 2005 10:54 AM