Collegiate Times

Jessie Davis was murdered. Why is this national news? Domestic homicides are tragic, far too commonplace, and if CNN were to cover them all there would be no time for anything else. So why among all the murders across the nation has hers been so significant?

It just so happens that Jessie Davis was experiencing a growth of tissue in her uterus at the time of her death. In other situations this would be a trivial detail. Imagine the news headline, “Slain Man Autopsy Shows Benign Colon Polyp.” No reporter would draw attention to such an inconsequential health condition. Any armchair CSI detective knows that when a person is killed and thrown in a field, all his associated living tissue deceases with him. It is not a man and a polyp that is murdered, simply a man. Unless the crime lab can link the polyp to a certain type of carcinogenic poisoning that implicates the murderer, that’s the end of the story regarding his digestive tract.

In Davis’ situation, however, the multi-cellular growth developing in her abdomen has been elevated to a status far beyond polyp. With dramatic inflection, and pause for commercial break, news anchors prompt the question whether the accused killer will face one count of murder… or two. This leads inevitably to the even more controversial question: is it possible to murder an unborn clump of cells?

This particular clump of cells was named Chloe. Her delivery was anticipated on Tuesday. According to Ohio law, if such a clump, clinically referred to as a fetus and commonly known as an unborn child, is determined to be viable outside the body then it is capable of being murdered. And so we await for the judicial process to be carried out as the suspected boyfriend is tried for double-homicide. Tragically it takes the simultaneous murder of both a mother and her unborn child to remind us of the reality of pre-birth humanity. 4,000 Chloes are murdered in America each day with no one to press charges on their behalf.