Nearly 7 years ago Ken Epp’s Bill C-484 (Unborn Victims of Crime Act), was raised to address a certain injustice in Canada that gets routinely overlooked. The Bill passed at Second Reading in the House of Commons, but an election was called later that year, and so the bill never made it any further. Since that time, no other MP has brought it back since.
Now this case is raising the issue again. Cassandra Kaake was 7 months pregnant when she was bludgeoned to death in a burned out Windsor, Ontario residence last week Thursday. The person responsible for this tragedy will be tried for Cassandra’s death, but not for that of her little girl, whom she had named Molly.
According to Dr. Greg Hasen, academic director of obstetrics for the Schulich School of Medicine, a seven-month-old fetus is “fully developed.”
Eyes are opening and closing, they’re drinking fluid, moving around,” Hasen said in an article in the Windsor Star (Dec. 16). “Their lungs aren’t fully mature, but the growth that occurs in the last two months of pregnancy is more in weight gain.
It’s to Canada’s shame that we have no such law, while in the U.S., it’s possible to treat an unborn baby as a crime victim in the courts of 38 states.
photo credit: gingerboximages via photopin
by 
Leave a Reply