Fetal abduction refers to the rare crime of child abduction by kidnapping of an at term pregnant woman and extraction of her fetus through a crude cesarean section. Dr. Michael H. Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato have alternatively referred to this crime as "fetus-snatching" or "fetus abduction." Homicide expert Vernon J. Geberth has used the term "fetal kidnapping." In the small number of reported cases, a few pregnant victims and about half of their fetuses survived the assault and non-medically performed cesarean.
Fetal abduction does not refer to medically induced labor or obstetrical extraction. The definition of the subject does not include compulsory cesarean sections for medical reasons nor child removal from parents for court-approved child protection. However, the "Children of the Disappeared" (desaparecidos) in the Argentine Dirty War are an example of criminal fetal abduction in state institutions as detailed by testimonies on cesarean delivery on desaparecidas and child adoption in a military hospital. Historical cases cesarean extraction for fetal murder (not for child adoption) fall outside the subject definition.
Abductor profile
Fetal abduction is mostly perpetrated by women, usually after organized planning. The abductor may befriend the pregnant victim. In some cases, the abductor impersonates a pregnant woman and later a puerperal mother, using weight gain and a prosthesis to fake a pregnancy and cutting of the reproductive organs to replicate injuries gained during birth. Some abductors then take the neonate to a hospital. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s spokesperson, Cathy Nahirny, stated in 2007, “Many times the abductor fakes a pregnancy and when it is time to deliver the baby, must abduct someone else's child”. Criminal motives include delusions of fulfilling a partner relationship, child-bearing and childbirth.
Statistics
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recorded 18 cases of fetal abductions in the United States between 1983 and 2015, which represented 6% of the 302 recorded cases of fetal abduction.
List of reported cases and attempts
Of the current list of 25 reported cases (not including attempts), 4 of the mothers and 13 of their fetuses survived. (This list distinguishes an attempted fetal abduction as without either murder of the mother or extraction of the fetus. An attempt can include severe injury to the mother and fetus.)
Fetal abduction cases
1987
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Cindy Ray was eight months pregnant when she was kidnapped at Kirtland Air Force Base outside a prenatal clinic. Darci Pierce was nineteen years old when she strangled the pregnant woman to death. She used her car keys to open Ray's womb, snatching the unharmed fetus, Amelia Monik. Amelia Monik survived, and Pierce was sentenced to 30 years to life for her crime.
1995
In Addison, Illinois, Debra Evans was murdered in her apartment. Jacqueline Williams, her boyfriend Fedell Caffey and her cousin Laverne Ward went into Evans' home and shot her in the head. She had three children and was pregnant with a fourth. Two of Evans' children were murdered along with their mother. Evans' murderers then proceeded to cut through her womb with scissors and remove the fetus. One of the children, a baby boy, survived, as did the fetus. The three murderers were caught and sentenced to life in prison.
1996
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, seventeen-year-old Carethia Curry was murdered by her friend, 29-year-old Felicia Scott. Curry was abducted by her friend on a night out. She was found three months later, stuffed in a garbage can at the bottom of a fifty-foot ravine with several gunshot wounds to the head, her torso sliced open. The baby girl Curry was carrying survived, and Scott was jailed for life.
1998
In Fresno, California, Margarita Flores was eight months pregnant when she received a phone call from Josephina Saldana, who offered her gifts of baby furniture and a free one-year supply of diapers. Flores went to a warehouse to collect them and was murdered. Saldana was caught at a hospital the day afterwards carrying a dead fetus that she claimed to have just given birth to. Saldana committed suicide three days after her conviction for kidnapping and murdering Flores and her unborn child and three weeks before her sentencing to life imprisonment.