By Deacon Keith Fournier
© Third Millennium, LLC
Catholic Online

On June 6, 2005, in Lufkin, Texas, Gerardo Flores, a nineteen year old, was convicted of two counts of murder. The prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. It could have been sought under Texas legislation, passed in 2003, entitled “The Fetus Protection Law”. Gerardo received an automatic life sentence for intentionally killing his twins. They are dead, killed while they were unable to defend themselves in the first home of the whole human race, their mothers womb.

The mother of the children, seventeen year old Erica Basoria, was four months pregnant at the time of the killing. Prior to the trial she repeatedly acknowledged that she wanted Gerardo to help her to kill their children. She also acknowledged that she regretted not getting an abortion. She told police that she had started to aggressively jog, and punch herself repeatedly in the abdomen, all in an effort to induce a miscarriage and cause the death of the children in her womb. She acknowledged that she had asked Flores for help in the intentional killing.

The facts are that Erica Basoria had indeed asked Gerardo Flores to help end her pregnancy and kill the twins. However, she could not be prosecuted; she had a “legal right” to an abortion. The Texas Statute under which she was prosecuted defines an embryo or fetus as an "individual." It allows for both criminal prosecution and civil action for causing intentional injury or death to an unborn child.

The law contains a “health care” exemption for “medical professionals” who perform a legal medical procedure, such as an abortion. The defense team argued that because Erica had repeatedly punched herself while her boyfriend, the father of the children, stepped on her stomach, the State could not prove who actually killed the children. They lost. Erica stood by Gerardo throughout the entire ordeal and wept at his sentencing.

The Texas Act was passed in 2003. It is similar to the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act”, or “Conner’s Bill”, the Federal legislation named for Conner Peterson, the slain unborn child of Laci Peterson. The Act defines “individual” as, “a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” The Texas Act is not applicable if the mother chooses to have an abortion provided by a “medical professional.” However, in that instance, the same sad reality occurs, children are brutally killed.

In a “legal” abortion, the mother exercises her so called “right” to end an innocent human life. She pays money to a “health care provider” who, through a variety of methods including dissection in the womb, violent suction, burning with salt, or chemical warfare on the child, intentionally kills the child. No-one bothers to do a thing. The law, in its brutal application, not only exempts them but allows them to be paid and elevates their perfidy to an exalted status, a “right.”

There is no doubt of the need for such legislation and there is a welcome trend toward protecting children in the womb from violence, such as the growth of vehicular homicide laws that allow prosecutors to charge for the killing of children in the womb when a pregnant woman is injured in an auto accident. This type of legislation has also played a vital role in calling public attention to the undeniable truth; children in the first home of the whole human race, the womb of their mother, are human persons. They should be protected from violent acts intended to kill or injure them and the State should prosecute those who commit such evil acts.

Yet, much of this kind of legislation has been carefully drafted, like this Texas law, to carve out an exception in the case of the killing of a child through an abortion. We all know the obvious insanity that this entails. That child is no less dead. The mother, not told the truth concerning what is really occurring, is the second victim. However, at least for now, the decision in the nefarious Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade has afforded legal protection to this evil. Worse yet, it has called it a “constitutional right”, even though it is nowhere to be found in the Constitution and is clearly wrong.

The twist in this bizarre case out of Texas will help us in our efforts to overturn Roe v Wade. That is if we seize the public opportunity and not let it pass by. It is time to stop the killing of children by legal abortion. The mother, Erica Basoria, informed the authorities she had been trying to kill her unborn children for months by punching herself in the abdomen. She filed an affidavit in which she stated: “When I was four months pregnant, I began to show, and at that time I decided that I should have gotten an abortion,” The same affidavit also said that her parents wanted her to have an abortion. “They said I was too young to ...