Ladies, imagine you are six months pregnant with twins.  You have learned the sex of each one and have given them names already.  You love them, read and sing to them already and anxiously await their births. Your family and friends are excited.  They’ve given you a couple of baby showers in joyful anticipation.
One day you are in a car crash.  You, your husband and two older children are injured.  A driver under the influence of prescription drugs crossed the center line and slammed into you head-on.  At first, the twin babies seem ok.  They seem healthy and have a heartbeat.  But soon it is discovered that the placenta has ruptured, depriving your babies of blood flow and they soon die.
The driver is charged with felony charges of driving while under the influence of a drug and grossly negligent vehicle operation causing an injury, along with charges of possession of a narcotic.
Thus, you learn while holding your lifeless precious ones in the hospital that the driver cannot be charged with a crime for your babies’ deaths.  The state does not recognize your babies as people.  It will not allow those perfectly formed babies you are holding to be called babies, or children....just fetuses.  The state has said your babies are not babies at all.
This is a true story going on right now.  The Senate Judiciary Committee in Vermont is set to take up a bill introduced by Senator Vince Illuzzi proposing that prosecutors be allowed to bring charges of murder or manslaughter when a victim is an unborn child.  The proposal exempts deaths caused by legal abortion or by the mother herself.  According to what I can gather, 35 states have already passed similar bills.  
The mother in the Vermont case is determined to work for changes in her state’s laws.  She says, “I never thought that I was a strong enough person, but when something like this happens, it kind of makes you wake up.  I don’t want any other mother - ever - to have to wake up and have the state tell them their babies aren’t babies.”
Readers, what do you think? The “Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004” protects the unborn child in “federal” circumstances.....military or federal employees, on federal property, etc., but cannot legislate for individual states. You may have heard the alternate title, “Laci and Connor’s Law.”  Scott Petersen was convicted of double homicide under the laws in California.  The laws vary wildly from state to state......go to the SC General Assembly for more information about our state laws.  
I need to do a lot more study.  Remember I have written about some things “I don’t get?”  Well, here is another.  I don’t get why in some states, I can take an accidental overdose of legally prescribed medication.....drive and cause an accident in which an unborn human....a fetus....dies and I’ll be prosecuted for murder.  And yet, in that same state, if the mother of that same unborn human...a fetus... decides to have an abortion, it is ok.
Wonder what the problem is?  Why can’t the lawmakers get on the same sheet of music?  Who is right and who is wrong?  Who decides that?  What is their basis for such judgment?  WHO are they looking to for the answers?  I wonder.
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