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Pro-life activists are calling for a former Stoughton, Massachusetts police detective, alleged to have murdered a young woman after having sexually abused her for years, to also be charged with murdering her unborn baby.
In February 2021, Matthew Farwell, 38, of North Easton is alleged to have murdered Sandra Birchmore of Canton by strangulation after Birchmore informed him she was pregnant with his child. Farwell is accused of killing Birchmore in her apartment and then arranging the scene to appear as if she had committed suicide, as the Boston Herald has reported.
Farwell’s indictment for Birchmore’s murder was filed August 27 in U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, but some officials appear to be weighing whether the Unborn Victims of Violence Act should also be applied as an additional count since Birchmore’s unborn baby also died.
Pro-life activists say the federal law clearly applies in this case.
“It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut case for enforcing federal law for protecting unborn children than this one, when the very existence of the unborn child was the very evidence against this monster,” Roger Severino, the vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the Herald.
The allegations presented in the indictment detail the gruesome history of the relationship between Farwell and Birchmore.
In 2012, the filing alleges, Farwell served as both a Stoughton police officer and as an instructor for the town’s Police Explorers Academy, a vocational education program created by the Boy Scouts of America for young people interested in law enforcement careers.
When Birchmore was 12 years old, she began participating in the Police Explorers program and remained involved in it until approximately 2016. Before she turned 16, Farwell allegedly began engaging in “sexual intercourse and other sex acts” with her, which continued until her death in 2021 at the age of 23.
“During some of the shifts when FARWELL was supposed to be performing his duties as a Stoughton police officer, he was instead engaged in sex acts with Birchmore,” the indictment reads.
The former police detective is married and has three children with his wife, according to the Herald.
Farwell is accused of murdering Birchmore after she had “excitedly revealed to him that she was pregnant with their child by texting him a photograph of a handmade card saying, ‘Congrats, we are going to be parents!’”
The application of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act to the case involving Farwell appears to be under consideration by law enforcement officials, the Herald reports.
In a press conference last month, both acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy and Boston FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Steve Kelleher highlighted the unborn baby in their comments about the case.
“Matthew Farwell’s gun and badge did not grant him authority to violate the Constitution and certainly didn’t entitle him to sexually exploit, abuse and rape a child before killing her and her unborn baby in an attempt to cover up his alleged crime,” Kelleher said.
Levy added from his findings as well that Birchmore “was very excited about becoming a mother: buying baby clothes and other items, taking precautions to ensure the health of her new child.”
“But Mr. Farwell did not share in that excitement,” the U.S. attorney added. “It’s alleged Mr. Farwell reacted quite negatively to the news that Sandra Birchmore was pregnant with his child and he acted angrily.”
According to the Herald, Levy has “left the door open for additional charges, either from his own office or from the local and state agencies with whom the feds shared their investigative output on the case.”
Signed into law in 2004 by President George W. Bush, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act is also called “Laci and Conner’s Law,” named after a case involving the murder of Laci Peterson and her unborn child by husband and father Scott Peterson.
The legislation reads under the section titled “Protection of unborn children”:
Whoever engages in conduct that violates any of the provisions of law listed in subsection (b) and thereby causes the death of, or bodily injury … to, a child, who is in utero at the time the conduct takes place, is guilty of a separate offense under this section.
Except as otherwise provided in this paragraph, the punishment for that separate offense is the same as the punishment provided under Federal law for that conduct had that injury or death occurred to the unborn child’s mother.
Colbe Mazzarella, an attorney and the president of the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund, told the Herald he is calling on Levy to charge Farwell under the federal law:
The accusation that a police officer killed his former student and their unborn baby strikes horror in every feeling heart. Such monumental selfishness was the reason for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act. This law was passed by Republicans and Democrats to punish and prevent many abusers who kill pregnant women or use violence to force a woman to abort their child.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), however, opposed the federal legislation over the concern that it would be the “first federal law to recognize a zygote (fertilized egg), a blastocyst (pre-implantation embryo), an embryo (through week 8 of a pregnancy), or a fetus as an independent ‘victim’ of a crime, with legal rights distinct from the woman who has been harmed.”
While the pro-abortion group says it “fully supports efforts to punish acts of violence against women that harm or terminate a wanted pregnancy,” it considers the application of the federal law as “an inappropriate method of imposing such punishment … because it dangerously seeks to separate the woman from her fetus in the eyes of the law.”
“Such separation is merely the first step toward eroding a woman’s right to determine the fate of her own pregnancy and to direct the course of her own health care,” the ACLU said, according to the Herald.
Severino said adding the second charge is no simple feat, given the Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering support of abortion:
It will take political pressure for them to charge what they should have done from the very beginning … Under the current administration, there isn’t a snowball’s chance that they would support an Unborn Victims of Violence Act charge given their radical pro-abortion policies.
Tom Harvey, a Massachusetts attorney with the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund, summed up the stark reality of the grisly case.
“Did not the baby have value?” Harvey posed in comments to the Herald. “A bipartisan bill passed by Congress shows that, under the law, that baby’s life had value. And Sandra Birchmore sure seemed to think so. There were two deaths here and the perpetrator should be charged accordingly.”
