(LifeSiteNews) — A fetal homicide charge against a 35-year-old Kentucky woman who chemically aborted her preborn baby at her home and then buried his remains in her backyard has been dismissed, amid state and national furor over the crime and its handling.
As LifeSiteNews covered on Tuesday, Kentucky State Police responded to a call from United Clinic about Melinda Spencer, who had come in and “disclosed that she had aborted her pregnancy [i.e., baby] at her residence.” According to the police, she admitted “she had ordered medication online to complete an abortion” and “took the medication which resulted in the death of a developed male infant.” Police later found the child, whose gestational age was not revealed, “in a shallow grave” on her property.
Spencer was charged with first degree fetal homicide, defined as causing the “death of an unborn child” except when “under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance for which there was a reasonable explanation or excuse,” as well as abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence.
However, WDRB reported Wednesday that the fetal homicide charge was later dismissed, with the court granting a motion to dismiss on the grounds that the state’s fetal homicide law explicitly states, “Nothing in this chapter shall apply to any acts of a pregnant woman that caused the death of her unborn child.”
“I sought this job with the intention of being a pro-life prosecutor but must do so within the boundaries allowed by the Kentucky State law I’m sworn to defend,” stated Miranda King, commonwealth attorney for Breathitt, Powell, and Wolfe counties. “I’m thankful for the investigative work of the Kentucky State Police on this case. I am also grateful to the dedicated citizens who served on the grand jury and thoroughly reviewed this case. We will prosecute the remaining lawful charges full and fairly.”
Spencer is not fully in the clear, however; she still faces the lesser charges of abusing a corpse and evidence-tampering. This means that Spencer avoiding prosecution for killing her son wasn’t good enough for Colleen Luckett of the far-left “Abortionfluencer Files” Substack, who complained that the remaining charges are “about maligning women” and the state “using creative charging to criminalize pregnancy outcomes it politically disapproves of.”
The dismissal highlights an ongoing debate even among pro-lifers about whether to punish women for abortions.
Historically, abortion bans in the United States have focused on penalizing the doctors who commit abortions and exempted the women who seek them out of the practical need to get women to testify against those with the technical skills to actually commit the act. In the modern era, most pro-life activists also say that abortion-minded women are secondary victims of the abortion industry, whom the pro-life movement seeks to persuade and heal rather than punish.
Pro-abortion activists have long used the specter of punishing women against both pro-lifers in two contradictory ways, primarily by spreading fears of sending vulnerable, desperate women to jail (despite the fact that the vast majority of pro-life bills have always expressly reserved punishment for abortionists), but sometimes trying instead to paint pro-lifers’ refusal to treat women like murderers as proof of hypocrisy or insincerity.
In recent years, with the fall of Roe v. Wade taking direct abortion bans out of the purely hypothetical realm, a vocal subset of abortion opponents (some eschewing the “pro-life” label in favor of “abolitionist”) have argued that the mainstream movement’s reluctance to simply treat abortions the same as any other murder, with all that entails, has held back the cause of ending abortion. More traditional pro-lifers argue that such a drastic shift is doomed to backfire in light of the cause’s precarious position in public opinion polls.
Regardless, all pro-lifers can agree that the case highlights the continuing power of abortion pills, mailed across state lines and taken in complete privacy, to undermine state pro-life protections.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s Prof. Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
Questions are currently swirling over when and how the Trump administration will handle the problem. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions primarily in the area of taxpayer funding, but concern has brewed among pro-lifers ever since he declared (amid a broader effort to “moderate” the Republican Party’s pro-life plank) that he would not enforce a federal law banning abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing a Biden administration policy that undermines state pro-life laws.
Pro-lifers were given hope in May that the White House’s position might change when U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (another formerly pro-abortion figure who “moderated” during his own presidential bid) promised in May a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills, though no conclusions or timetable have since been announced. But some pro-life leaders have recently called for the firing of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary over reports he is intentionally “slow walking” the review, which Makary denies.
