The case involved an 8.5 month old preborn baby girl who was delivered by an emergency Caesarean section from her mother’s womb after a car accident. The baby died. The judge was asked to rule on whether or not the child’s death was an act of murder. He said it was not.
The baby girl was born alive and died hours later of asphyxia. The county coroner then ruled that the child’s death was a homicide and "said that the collision damaged the mother’s placenta, limiting blood flow to the newborn."
But the public defender in the case said that the prosecutors could not show probable cause because the child in the womb was neither a "person" nor a "child" under Colorado state law at the time of the accident. Therefore the entity—baby girl Lileigh Lehnen—who died of asphyxia because of a tragic accident simply was not a human being according to the defense attorney and the judge. Case dismissed!
Well, to that I say, "Hogwash!" While we all know that the judicial system in this nation has been turned topsy-turvy due to the arrogant Supreme Court decisions of the past 40 years, common sense should dictate that if something looks like a baby and acts like a baby, then indeed she is/was a baby! Not so in America, not so.
What is even more surprising about this case is that the district attorney, the man who should have been defending the preborn child’s right to life, said that the judge’s ruling was "not completely a surprise. It’s a very murky part of the law."
In other words, because the law is written in such a way that preborn children simply do not exist, if one of them happens to survive the womb and then dies, she is still not a child, but rather a "murky" issue that the law denies has validity.
If you ever wondered why the entire pro-life movement must be focused on protecting every single innocent preborn human being as a person under the law and in society, this is but one case that should help you to not only understand but to become an advocate for personhood right here and now. That baby was as much a member of the human family as you, the reader of this blog. The only difference between her and the rest of us was her place of residence prior to the accident. Even when she was fully born and could be seen by the naked eye as a baby, her existence was denied and thus her death will go unpunished.
In Colorado there is effort under way right now to change that by putting a personhood initiative on the November ballot. Perhaps God will use this travesty of justice, as enunciated for the world by Judge Richard Gurley, to accomplish good in that state. Perhaps cases like this will give Colorado for Equal Rights the impetus and the funds it needs to put those signatures before the proper authorities and get the personhood proposal on the ballot this year.
Only time will tell, of course. But one thing is certain—regardless of the ballot initiative outcome, the sad truth is that Lileigh Lehnen went to her untimely death with nary a word of remorse or an expression of concern from the very people appointed to carry out justice in America. To that judge she never was.