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Tuesday February 22, 2005
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French Appeals Court Upholds Denial of Existence of Unborn Child
METZ, February 22, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A French appeals court has ruled that a man who killed a pregnant woman is not responsible for two deaths.
In a case that bears comparison with that of Laci and Connor Peterson in the US, Kevin Germon was under the influence of cannabis while he was driving his van on a motorway in October 2003. The van struck another car killing 34 year-old Florinda Braganca and her 22 week-old unborn child. Her husband insisted that manslaughter charges be laid for both deaths but the French courts have disagreed.
In France, which like most European and North American countries has unrestricted access to abortion, the unborn child cannot be a victim of a crime since a victim of a crime must be a person. In perhaps conscious irony, the BBC reported that the prosecution’s position was that the “the law should recognise that the future baby was ‘a human being from the moment of conception.’”
Germon was sentenced to a year of imprisonment for one count of manslaughter. The Appeals court ruled that only one person had been killed.
Only in the United States, with the passage of the Unborn Victims of Violence act, has this rhetoric been seriously challenged. Where abortion is legal without restrictions, it is necessary to maintain the legal fiction that an unborn child is a non-entity legally or medically until birth.
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