LUFKIN, Texas (AP) - The
would-be teen mother arrived by ambulance last
May, her belly bruised, the twin fetuses she
carried for five months gone and her lips tightly
sealed.
Authorities assumed 16-year-old
Erica Basoria had been beaten and charged her
boyfriend, 18-year-old Gerardo "Jerry"
Flores, with murder under the state's new law
protecting the unborn.
But it wasn't that simple.
Basoria told authorities she had been trying to
kill the fetuses for weeks and finally asked
Flores to help by stepping on her stomach.
....
The case has attorneys on both
sides questioning the fairness of a statute that
considers one person's crime another person's
constitutional right.
....
"About two weeks before
the miscarriage, I started hitting myself,"
Basoria wrote. "I would do this every other
day and I would use both of my fists when I did
this. I would hit myself 10 or more times."
Then she turned to her
boyfriend.
"I said I didn't want to
do it," he recalled. But she kept pleading,
he said, until he agreed to step on her.
....
"Murder sounds like when
you go out there and kill somebody. But the
baby's unborn," said Flores' sister, Maira.
"It would have been different if they were
born already and he killed them."