PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2019-02-15 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did a Man Escape a Murder Charge Because of New York’s Reproductive Health Act? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On 22 January 2019, New York state enacted the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), a law that -- as described by its advocates -- was intended to bring New York state, which had legalized abortion prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, in line with the less restrictive federal standards generated by that ruling and modern medical guidelines: The most controversial effect of this act was that it removed abortion from the New York criminal code. Prior to the RHA, homicide charges could encompass the abortion of an unborn child with which a female has been pregnant for more than twenty-four weeks even if the fetus were not viable. Now in New York abortion is regulated under public health law rather than under the criminal code. This issue drew significant national attention following the New York Post’s coverage of the gruesome murder of Jennifer Irigoyen and her unborn child by her boyfriend, Anthony Hobson: Hobson was charged with second degree murder on 8 February 2019. The Post later reported that prosecutors had initially included a charge of abortion ... but rescinded it because of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new Reproductive Health Act. Meris Campbell, a spokeswoman for the New York district attorney, told the New York Times that prosecutors dropped a second-degree abortion charge after learning that the Reproductive Health Act, which was signed on Jan. 22, had stripped the crime from the state penal code. This case became a galvanizing point for the pro-life movement. The Times cited the statements of New York State Catholic Conference spokesperson Dennis Poust, who tweeted that Thanks to the #RHA, it’s open season on pregnant women in New York. On 11 February 2019, Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, penned a story for LifeNews.com with the headline He Stabbed His Girlfriend’s Stomach to Kill Her Baby, Won’t Be Charged Because of New York’s Abortion Law. Donohue’s headline was misleading. Though it was made clear in the body of the article that Dobson was still being charged with second-degree murder, the headline made it sound as though he were not being charged with any crime. According to Daniel R. Alonso, a former chief assistant prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, who spoke to the Times, the dropping of the abortion charge would not have affected Dobson’s potential sentence length: New York State Senators Liz Krueger and Anna Kaplan, the two co-sponsors of the Reproductive Health Act, argued in an 8 February 2019 editorial published in the Albany Times Union that the RHA does not prevent appropriate charging and sentencing of violent perpetrators: The ambiguously constructed assertion presented by LifeNews and others that a man Won’t Be Charged Because of New York’s Abortion Law is only partially true. Dobson won’t be charged with unlawful abortion because the RHA removed that crime from the state penal code, but he is still charged with murdering his girlfriend, and the dropping of unlawful abortion charges against him will not alter his prospective sentence length if he is convicted. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url