Saturday, February 26, 2005

Bobo's World

Link:


The would-be teen mother arrived by ambulance last May, her womb empty, belly bruised and lips tightly sealed.

The twin fetuses that 16-year-old Erica Basoria carried for five months had slipped into the bathroom toilet while her boyfriend and his family slept. They awoke to her cries and called 911.

Basoria had bruises on her eye, arm and wrist, so authorities assumed she had been beaten. Her boyfriend, 18-year-old Gerardo "Jerry" Flores, was charged with murder under the state's new law protecting the unborn.

But it wasn't that simple. Basoria eventually told authorities she had been trying to kill her unborn sons for weeks and finally asked Flores to step on her stomach.

"When I was four months pregnant, I began to show, and at that time I decided that I should have gotten an abortion," Basoria wrote in an affidavit.

The Texas law, like many others across the nation, bans prosecution of mothers because they have a legal right to end pregnancies. So Basoria can't be charged. That fact has attorneys on both sides questioning the fairness of a statute that considers one person's crime another person's constitutional right.