Utah fetal homicide statute is upheld

In a landmark decision Friday, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that unborn children at all stages of development are covered under the state's criminal homicide statute.

The divided court rejected arguments that the law is unconstitutionally vague, ruling it "clearly encompasses a human being at any stage of development in utero."

Legal analysts do not believe the decision will have any impact on Utah abortion laws, as the homicide statute specifically exempts the death of an unborn child caused by an abortion.

The court issued its ruling in the case of Roger Martin MacGuire, a Layton man charged with shooting and killing his pregnant ex-wife in January 2001. MacGuire was charged with two counts of capital murder for the deaths of 39-year-old Susan MacGuire and her unborn child, estimated to be between 13 and 15 weeks old.

Defense attorneys argued MacGuire, 50, could not legally be charged with murdering the fetus because the Utah homicide statute failed to properly define who is protected by the term "unborn child."

In Friday's 4-1 decision, the court determined that lawmakers in 1983 clearly intended the unborn child language to include all fetuses, from conception to birth.

"The common-sense meaning of the term 'unborn child' is a human being at any stage of development in utero, because once fertilization occurs, an unborn child is an 'individual human life' that is 'in existence and developing prior to birth,' " the opinion states.

With the MacGuire case in mind, lawmakers in 2002 amended the statute to include an unborn child "at any stage of its development."

Though she agreed with the court's decision that the criminal homicide statute covers fetuses at all developmental stages, Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine M. Durham disagreed that the capital murder charges against MacGuire could stand.

The case qualified as a capital offense under the pretense that one or more "persons" died in the commission of the crime. However, Durham noted in her dissenting opinion that under the law, a fetus cannot qualify as a "person" with full constitutional rights.

Thus, she wrote, the fetus cannot be counted as the second death because the aggravated murder statute is limited to the murder of a "person." MacGuire could only be charged with two counts of first-degree felony murder because that statute specifically protects an "unborn child," Durham said.

"Declaring a fetus to be a 'person' entitled to equal protection would require not only overturning Roe v. Wade but also making abortion, as a matter of constitutional law, illegal in all circumstances, even to save the life of the mother," Durham wrote.