The body of a newborn baby, with its umbilical cord still attached, was found floating in Lake Pontchartrain on Tuesday. An hour later, a woman from Metaire, Louisiana confessed to the killing.
Ciara Craig was charged with first-degree murder Wednesday for dumping her newborn infant into Lake Pontchartrain. Craig told police in Kenner City, Jefferson Parish that she threw her baby away because she did not want to raise the child. Craig claimed the baby was the result of a one-night stand with a stranger. She told investigators that she thought her baby was still alive when she threw it into the lake because she thought she felt its heart beat.
Ciara Craig is a 20 (or 21)-year-old sales clerk who hid her pregnancy from her family and gave birth alone at home on Tuesday. After giving birth, she told police that she wrapped her baby in two bath towels and put the infant inside two plastic garbage bags. Then she drove to Lake Pontchartrain and dumped the baby into the water.
I am sure this all made perfect sense to Craig, because she had wanted to have an abortion, but was told by the abortion clinic that she was too far along. She even considered adoption, but killing a baby these days, one way or another, is so much easier than filling out adoption forms. Also, an abortion can be done in secret, much like throwing a baby in the lake, but going through the adoption process is so public, intrusive and inconvenient.
Craig could have dropped her baby off anonymously at any emergency care facility, like a hospital or fire station, which is allowed under the Louisiana’s Safe Haven Law, but she decided to drop the infant into Lake Pontchartrain. After all, it was just an inconvenient lump of unwanted tissue expelled from her body, and she had the right to choose what she wanted to do with it. She made the choice to have the one-night stand, and then she made the logical choice to get rid of the inconvenient and unwanted tissue.
If doctors can deliver a baby’s torso, arms and legs and then drive an implement into the base of the baby’s unborn skull to suck its brains out, what’s the difference between that and dumping the body into Lake Pontchartrain, or catching the tissue a little earlier and slicing and dicing it up in the womb? It doesn’t matter that it has nerve endings and feels pain, or tiny lungs to suck in water — it’s unwanted tissue, for crying out loud!
If it’s not a baby until the mother says it’s a baby, then Ms. Craig should probably earn a medal for moving the Woman’s Right to Choose movement along a step further towards its natural conclusion.
The body of the baby, I mean the unwanted tissue, was autopsied Wednesday to establish the cause of death. A Kenner police detective, Brian McGregor, said there are indications that the infant was breathing when it was thrown in the lake.
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