Family Research Council

Update on Murder Prosecution in Tampa, Florida

by Chris Gacek

May 19, 2013

Earlier today, I posted a comment on the use of the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA) in a Tampa, Florida, case.  Since then I have been alerted by Doug Johnson (National Right to Life) to an article he posted that contains a great deal of additional information about the application of the UVVA and the facts of the Welden case.  It is worth reading.

It turns out that charges have been brought under the UVVA on two occasions.  The first involved a 2010 New Mexico case in which the UVVA-based charge was dropped after Frederick Beach pleaded guilty to a second-degree murder charge for killing a pregnant woman on an Indian reservation.  The second case took place in the military justice system when an Air Force enlisted man, Scott D. Boie, surreptitiously gave his pregnant wife misoprostol.  He was convicted of the UVVA-based crime.  Boie’s appeal has been rejected, and he is serving is 9 ½-year sentence for the UVVA offense and other crimes.

Apparently, Florida’s fetal homicide law is even worse than I thought (see this NRLC website): its quickening provision defines the term “unborn quick child” to mean a “viable fetus.”  Triggering a provision such as that would require a gestational age in the early 20-weeks. Remee Lee’s baby was only six or seven weeks along.

Unborn Victims of Violence Act Used in Tampa

by Chris Gacek

May 19, 2013

History may have been made last week when federal prosecutors used the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA) to indict a man who is alleged to have killed his own unborn child.  It is quite likely that this is the first use of the UVVA.

The news of this terrible crime spread across the nation after the federal government announced an indictment of John Andrew Welden in Tampa, Florida.  Welden tricked his pregnant girlfriend, Remee Lee, into taking a drug, misoprostol (Cytotec^®), which produces abortions in early pregnancy.  Lee was six weeks pregnant and refused to have an abortion as Welden had demanded.

Welden’s father is an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed the ultrasound and blood tests that confirmed Lee’s pregnancy.  (Welden’s father, apparently, was not involved in the crime.)

After confirmation of the pregnancy, John Andrew Welden told Lee that her blood tests revealed that she had an infection.  He gave her a bottle of pills in an orange plastic bottle of the type one receives from a pharmacy.  Welden falsified a label somehow to indicate that the bottle contained amoxicillin and that a prescription from Welden’s father called for her to take the medicine three times daily. 

In fact, the bottle contained misoprostol, the second drug in the RU-486 abortion regimen.  Misoprostol is used primarily to prevent patients who take large quantities of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) from developing ulcers.  Very late in pregnancies it has legitimate obstetrical uses that, roughly speaking, have to do with inducing the delivery of a healthy full-term baby.  However, early, in pregnancies a pregnant woman who takes misoprostol will begin to have uterine contractions that can kill the baby by causing the uterus to expel its contents.

That is what happened in this case.  Lee says she woke up on Easter Sunday in a pool of blood.  The staff at a nearby hospital told her that her baby had died.  It was quickly apparent to these medical professionals that the drug she had been given was not the antibiotic.  Interestingly, Welden had gone so far as to eliminate drug-identifying features from the tablets.  It was quickly determined that she had, in fact, been given misoprostol.

I am not sure how the case developed – optimally this matter would be handled by state authorities who would prosecute the matter.  Unfortunately, Florida law is archaic when it comes to the protection of the unborn.  According to Americans United for Life (see Defending Life 2012), “[u]nder Florida criminal law, the killing of an unborn child after ‘quickening’ (discernible movement in the womb) is defined as manslaughter.”  Prior to quickening, killing an unborn baby is not a crime in Florida.

Remee Lee’s baby was only six week’s old gestationally.  Typically, quickening occurs from weeks 13 to 16.  A manslaughter prosecution would not have been possible in this case.  It may be this fact that brought about the federal government’s involvement. 

 On May 14^th a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed against Welden that contained two counts.  Count One charges Welden with tampering with consumer products (18 U.S.C.§ 1365(a)) – in this case, the drugs taken by Remee Lee which relied upon a falsified prescriptive drug label and tablets that were defaced.  Count Two, relying upon the drug tampering, then proceeds to charge Welden with violations of the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act (18 U.S.C.§ 1841) and the federal murder provision (18 U.S.C.§ 1111(a)). 

 The UVVA is a federal act.  Federal jurisdiction in a Florida murder depends on the violation of an underlying federal law.  Typically, this will involve interstate commerce, and, in this case, it is tampering with a consumer product.  That provision is referenced in the UVVA.

 Praise needs to be given to the federal officials involved:  Robert E. O’Neill (U.S. Attorney - Middle District of Florida), W. Stephen Muldrow (Assistant, U.S. Attorney), and A. Lee Bentley, III (First Assistant U.S. Attorney, Chief, Criminal Division – Tampa).

No cheers for the state of Florida which needs to amend its abortion statute.

See the story from the Tampa Bay Times by Patty Ryan and Will Hobson.  Go to this link for a PDF copy of the unsealed indictment.

Fifty Questions to Ask Before Going to College

by Chris Gacek

April 26, 2013

“Fifty Questions to Ask Before Going to College” is the title of an article by Lynn O’Shaughnessy, a writer with CBS MoneyWatch.  I think she is correct that these questions focus the mind on the “rubber meets the road” issues.  She concentrates on topics like graduation rates, class size, who does the actual teaching, what honors programs exist, job placement rates, rates of tuition increases, levels of graduate indebtedness, and student load default rates.  These are much more practical topics than: “How many rock climbing walls do you have?”

Clearly, anyone going to college needs to develop a profile for each potential school like the one outlined in the article.  This article provides a well-grounded list of questions from which potential college students and their parents can improvise and create their specific set of questions.

Gosnell Grand Jury Report

by Chris Gacek

April 19, 2013

While reading James Taranto’s excellent pieces (April 15 & April 18) on the Kermit Gosnell murder trial, I noticed a reference to a grand jury report in this case.  If you are interested in the case, the January 2011 grand jury report is easily available for download.  The document is about 280 pages in length.  Sohrab Ahmari’s interview of Dr. Leon Cass on Gosnell should be available here.  Thanks to the Wall Street Journal.

Your Kids Belong to the Collective — Resistance is Futile

by Chris Gacek

April 8, 2013

Today, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck discussed the MSNBC promo featuring one of their hosts, Melissa Harris-Perry, who nonchalantly asserts that we should adopt the “notion” that children “belong to whole communities.” Both Limbaugh and Beck appeared close to having strokes.  Justifiably so. 

In the Glenn Beck video, she says:

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.

“….never invested as much in pubic education as we should have….”  The United States spends an enormous amount on public education.

This philosophy of political-educational is not new: Plato espoused such totalitarianism, so did Danton during the French Revolution.  FRC has a great essay on statists and education.  See the FRC pamphlet, “Who Should Decide How Children Are Educated” by Jack Klenk for an exploration of how such ideas conflict with American principles of freedom, rights, and constitutional law (see esp. sections 4 and 5).  (Here is the executive summary.)

Oral Arguments on DoMA at the Supreme Court Today

by Chris Gacek

March 28, 2013

There is a great deal of news today about the oral arguments at the Supreme Court regarding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  If you would like to read some good background information on DOMA, read the PDF of FRC’s 2010 pamphlet on the statute.  Learn why it was enacted, what it does, and why it is constitutional.  

An Era Ends: Sheet Music Magazine Publishes Its Last Edition

by Chris Gacek

March 23, 2013

David R. Sands of the Washington Times recently published this article about our changing cultural landscape entitled “Sheet Music’s Last Note.” In it, he informs us that the last issue of America’s only magazine providing its readers with piano sheet music expired last autumn.  In thirty-six years years, Sheet Music Magazine had printed nearly 3,000 songs.  At its height, the magazine had 150,000 subscribers who received a copy every two months. 

What killed the Sheet Music?  Accordingly to the publisher, Ed Shanaphy, his magazine…

…couldn’t survive a perfect storm of factors gathering in recent years, from a bad economy, falling piano sales and the rise of online downloading services for sheet music to the decline of a generation that played piano for fun and the rise of a generation that gets into music through earbuds and prefers its musical scores auto-translated into audio online.

That is quite a combination of technological and social change. 

The article has some fascinating figures on piano sales in the United States.  In 1909, 360,000 pianos were sold in America with a population of 90.5 million.  In 1969 (see diagram), there were 220,000 sold (pop. 220 million).  Finally, in 2007, there 315 million people in the country, but sales totaled only 62,500. 

The 1909 figure is useful because it represents a time when there were no/few recorded music players, no radios, etc.  If you wanted to have musical entertainment, you had to do it yourself or pay someone to play it live.  More instructive is 1969 when we had high quality FM radio and very good stereo recordings for sale.  Since then, piano sales have really plunged.

What does it mean?  Are we watching a decline of cultural literacy.  Perhaps, it just represents a decline of the piano relative to other instruments, but I doubt it.

As a consumer of music, I know that what I listen to – just in terms of the sound quality – seems greatly inferior to my parents’ high fidelity stereo.  People used to spend a fortune on sound equipment.  That doesn’t seem to happen now.  There has been a huge shift to video technology with ever-better formats like blu-ray.  Does an audio analog (ha-ha, no irony intended) of blu-ray exist?  The world seems to be moving in the opposite direction.  MP3 files aren’t even as good as the much-criticized recordings on CDs.  Now I listen to classical music using the speakers on my Kindle.  Sound quality may not matter with rap, but it matters if you want to hear the percussion instruments in Carmen.  True that, but I just paid $1.99 for 13 hours of some composer whose music is play by the Latvian Symphony Orchestra and sits on my cloud.  I can listen any place that has wi-fi.  That enhances my cultural literacy.

I have no great theory, but David Sands’ article will make you think a bit.  How has your appreciation and interaction with quality music changed?  For better, worse?  Do you care?

Mind-Boggling Abortion Statistics from China

by Chris Gacek

March 18, 2013

The Financial Times has been doing excellent reporting related to Chinese demographics problems.  Of particular interest is China’s aging population which has been brought about in large measure to its zero-growth population policies that have been in place since the 1970s.  The most important aspect of these policies is the “one-child policy” which mandates forced abortions and sterilizations.

In a front-page article in the FT’s weekend edition Simon Rabinovitch, a reporter in the paper’s Beijing bureau, presented population data obtained from the Chinese health ministry:

China’s one-child policy has been the subject of a heated debate about its economic consequences as the population ages. Forced abortions and sterilisations have also been criticised by human rights campaigners such as Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge at the US embassy in Beijing last year.

China first introduced measures to limit the size of the population in 1971, encouraging couples to have fewer children. The one-child rule, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and some rural families, was implemented at the end of the decade.

Since 1971, doctors have performed 336m abortions and 196m sterilisations, the data reveal. They have also inserted 403m intrauterine devices, a normal birth control procedure in the west but one that local officials often force on women in China.  (my emphasis).

The magnitude of these figures is staggering.  By comparison, at present there are 315 million people living in the United States.  Rabinovitch does not really tell where the data came from within the Chinese government, but these are pretty specific numbers that make sense.  In short, we are talking about a maximum of 336 million Chinese who would be under the age of 42 – the peak working years.

A Nice Summary of the College Debt Mess

by Chris Gacek

March 9, 2013

Charles Blow of the New York Times has written a very helpful analysis of recent statistics and realities pertaining to the College Debt Crisis.  His column appeared in the March 9^th print edition (“A Dangerous ‘New Normal’ in College Debt.”)  See the online article with excellent links to a number of studies, reports.  He begins with the observation, “We are reaching a crisis point in this country’s higher education system.”  A statement that is undeniable. 

He concludes as follows: “Our national educational aspirations and the debt crisis that they’re creating are colliding. We are on an unsustainable track. This will not end well.”  Again, undeniable.

I don’t know if this is sequester-driven brinksmanship or part of a larger budgetary trend, but the Army Times writes that “[t]he Army’s popular Tuition Assistance program is being suspended because of the budget squeeze, although the many thousands of soldiers currently enrolled in courses will be allowed to complete those courses.”  The shutdown began at 5 p.m. EST on March 8^th.  If it is the former, it is despicable.  However, I fear that even if sequester-driven politics is in play, the long-term outlook for military budgets keeping up with ever-escalating college tuition is not great.

Ai WeiWei in D.C. and Chen Guangcheng Interview

by Chris Gacek

January 30, 2013

Earlier this week, I wrote about a recent FRC event discussing China’s forced population control policies. This weekend, CBS’s news program, “Sunday Morning” carried a feature on the world-famous Chinese dissident and artist Ai WeiWei. The story focused on an exhibit, running until February 24, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

In October 2012, the British magazine, the New Statesman, published an edition edited by Ai WeiWei containing numerous interviews. The Mandarin edition is available in PDF here. This edition contains an interview of the blind anti-one-child policy activist, Chen Guangcheng, by Ai WeiWei. An English translation of the Ai WeiWei-Chen Guangcheng conversation may be found here. Mr. Chen and his family fled China in May 2012 and now live in New York City.

It is a very powerful interview, here is one paragraph:

Ai Weiwei: You understand the issues surroun­ding the one-child policy and have participated in relevant work on this topic. Could you discuss your views on it?

Chen Guangcheng: Human life is of paramount importance to the traditional morals of Chinese culture. This concept has been trampled on by uncivilised policies and behaviour – including forced abortions – to the point of complete devastation. After decades of violent abortions, people have lost almost all respect and regard for life. It isn’t just ordinary parents who are affected by the one-child policy: friends, relatives and neighbours can also be implicated. And an inevitable result is an ageing society. But the most detrimental effect of the policy is the destruction of the value of life.

Later in the article there is this stunning, illuminating exchange:

Ai Weiwei: There is a huge industrial chain – every area has a family planning office and a control department. The system is a massive employer.

Chen Guangcheng: Yes. And it’s not just about employment: there are wider economic interests as well. There were 130,000 forced sterilisations and abortions. This has created an industry, the income from which is extremely high. Over 60 million people are affected by this policy – your neighbours, for example. If you have violated family planning and become pregnant and they cannot find you, your neighbours in a 50-metre radius will be arrested. In other words, they will use your house as the centre of a 50-metre circle, arresting at least five other households.

If you count the four directions from the house, at least 20 families will be affected. They will arrest one person from each family and lock them away to “study”. Every day, they have to pay 200 yuan as their tuition fee and they will be beaten once in the morning and once at night. Therefore, people do whatever they can to find the pregnant woman. Because the families are worried, they call on their relatives to bribe the officials to release the person arrested. They pay between 3,000 and 5,000 yuan. After they hand over the money, the officials think of a way to send the person home but they can still be rearrested after three to five days. And then they have to pay again to get the person rereleased. There won’t even be a receipt. That’s a tremendous amount of income. If you cut off the revenue stream of these family planning officials, of course they will be angry.

I have to admit that I have never heard this before. Well, let’s all enjoy our cheap Chinese imports,America.