A Choice Not a Child

Earlier this summer we commented on the rather transparent grandstanding by Worcester County State’s Attorney Joel T. Todd in the charging of Christy Freeman with murder.

As a quick refresher, Ms. Freeman is the Ocean City woman who was found to be in the possession of at least four dead babies, one recently deceased, back in July. As unsavory and unsanitary as it might be there is no law in Maryland against mothers offing infants in utero. Maryland ranks eighth in the nation in the number of abortions, after all.

Now a grand jury has refused to indict and Ms Freeman has been released from jail where she has been held without bail since July. Ironically, she has long since been cleared of a crime in the death of the baby that resulted in her arrest, rather she was held in the death of one baby thought to have died in 2004.

It is cases like these that really make one lose faith in the criminal justice system. Ms. Freeman is hardly a sympathetic character and her conduct reprehensible. But instead of behaving honorably and reading the plain text of the statute, Mr. Todd deprived Ms. Freeman of over two months of her freedom rather than have the courage and stand up and say what we did when she was arrested. It is not illegal for a Maryland woman to kill her fetus, with or without the assistance of a doctor.