Jeff Durham and Nancy Kaake (centre back) are joined by Conservative MPs Harold Albrecht, Michael Cooper, Rachael Harder, Cathay Wagantall, Garnett Genuis, Kelly Block, and Mark Warawa on the day of the Molly and Cassie's Law vote. A private member’s bill that would have made it a separate crime to assault a pregnant woman causing the death of her unborn [...]
On June 5, Candice Rochelle Bobb’s son passed away at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. Just three weeks earlier, he had been delivered prematurely by emergency C-section after his mother, who was then 24 weeks pregnant, was fatally shot in Etobicoke while sitting in the backseat of a vehicle. No one has yet to be arrested for the crime but the [...]
Matthew Brush, 26, of LaSalle, Ont., has been charged with the murder of Cassandra Kaake, 31, who was found dead in a burnt-out home in Windsor in December. Kaake was seven months pregnant and named her unborn daughter Molly before she was bludgeoned to death. Molly also died. Brush is being charged with a single murder because Canadian criminal law does not [...]
Reps Rene Ellmers (4.N.C.) left and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) right had initially backed the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act but withdrew their support and called for a weaker bill. The US House of Representatives passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” on the 42 anniversary of Roe v. Wade, hours after the March for Life in the U.S. [...]
A brain-dead pregnant Irish woman was taken off life support on Dec. 26 in wake of a Dublin High Court ruling that found that the unborn child would not have a chance of surviving. The woman, who was in her late 20s and already had two young children, was declared brain-dead on Dec. 3, four days after suffering a serious head injury [...]
The murder of a 31-year-old pregnant woman in Windsor, Ontario is leading some people to question why Canada’s laws don’t defend unborn victims of crime. Cassandra Kaake’s body was found by firefighters on Dec. 11 in a house on Benjamin Avenue in the southwestern Ontario city during a call to extinguish a fire. Kaake was seven months pregnant. The cause of her [...]
The laying of a criminal charge in the high-profile death of a London, Ont. newborn baby injured in the womb will expose the “inconsistencies” of current Canadian law that protects newborns, pro-life advocates say, while ignoring the same children if they have not yet made “the eight-inch journey down the birth canal.” London police announced Sept. 26 the laying of a belated [...]
Unborn victims of violence issue comes to forefront After Aysun Sesen, a pregnant 25-year-old Toronto woman, was killed in October, the media focused on the the issue of unborn victims of violence and the absurdity that the unborn child is a legal non-entity in criminal law. Sesen was the fifth high-profile murder in Canada since 2005 that took the life of the [...]
On a mild fall day, I sit in the Dreamers’ Peace Garden in Regent Park South, contemplating the Month of the Dead. I offer my prayers in union with the one who, in another garden, brought his own agony to prayer. I hand to him my own grief and the grief of my counsellees. According to a plaque affixed to a rock: [...]
The Conservative government in Ottawa has nearly impeccable credentials when it comes to its tough-on-crime agenda. From minimum sentences to lessened tolerance for drug pushers to more tools for police, this government appears serious about tackling crime in Canada. That makes it all the more disturbing that in 2006, the Prime Minister’s Office helped scuttle a private member’s bill from Conservative MP [...]
In Dartmouth, across the harbour from Halifax, N.S., Charlene Marie Knapp, 28, was admitted to hospital in the early morning of August 1 after being stabbed 15 times with a sword. She was almost four months pregnant. Her sister, Stephanie Humber from Essex, Ont., later told the media that “three of the 15 stab wounds went clear through Charlene’s body. She underwent [...]
In May, a sub-committee of the standing committee on procedural and House affairs ruled that Bill C-291, a private member’s bill by Conservative MP Leon Benoit (Vegreville-Wainwright) that would have made it a separate criminal offence to harm an unborn child during the commission of a crime against a pregnant mother, was non-votable. On June 6, the full committee upheld the decision [...]
Man who killed his baby in utero can be tried for murder An appeal hearing in Great Britain will define whether a person who fatally injures a child “en ventre sa mere’ (in the womb of the mother) can be charged with murder or manslaughter. The hearing follows a 1993 case where a trial judge acquitted a man accused of murdering his [...]