On Monday, January 25, Andrea Curry-Demus was convicted of cutting out the fetus from another woman and killing the woman. Curry-Demus, 40, tricked an 18-year-old pregnant woman, Kia Johnson, into coming to her apartment where Curry-Demus drugged Johnson, ripped out Johnson’s fetus, killed Johnson, and then pretended that the baby was her own child. This is the most recent example of the violent crime of “fetal-ripping” in which someone kills—or tries to kill—a pregnant woman in the hopes of passing off the fetus as her own child. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583855,00.html?test=latestnews)

It has been approximately six months since I first wrote an article on the pattern of “fetal-ripping” which I describe as “the grotesque violent crime of killing a woman to steal her still-living fetus”. When I wrote the original article (http://www.ifeminists.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.525) I presented case study after case study of examples of women who killed, or attempted to kill, pregnant women for the purpose of stealing their viable fetuses. Since then, I wrote an article about another case study of fetal-ripping (http://www.ifeminists.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.635). I am writing these articles because I believe that I have found a type of violent crimes that target only women, and that are also committed only by women. I am worried that no one in law enforcement, social science, or mainstream journalism is warning the general public about this danger that pregnant women face.

I believe that two factors are in play to prevent the authoritative voices I just mentioned from recognizing this pattern and popularizing it as they would with any other violent crime. The first factor is denial; even well-educated professionals do not want to believe that they have missed recognizing the danger of fetal-ripping, and the grotesqueness of the crime makes it easier for otherwise responsible professionals to turn away. The other factor is protectionism; we hold a paradigm that men are more violent than women, and therefore the discovery of a type of violent crime that is committed exclusively by women—as fetal-ripping is—has the potential to shatter that paradigm.

I recognize that my sample size of Phiengchai Sisouvanh Synhavong, Tiffany Hall, Lisa Montgomery, Effie Goodson, Veronica Deramous, and now Andrea Curry-Demus is small. However, six examples of a type of violent crime committed exclusively by women in the last few years deserves notice and study. It would be irresponsible to dismiss these examples as random crimes, when it appears that there are women who are so intent to present someone else’s child as their own that they are willing to kill other women.