Compassion demands justice
By Lois McLatchie, Artillery Row:
After baby Stanley Mayo took his first breath, it wasn’t long until his last.
His mother, deciding that he must die that day, crushed his head — most likely with her foot. He was battered. But still he lived. So following the first assault, she shoved cotton wool balls deep into his throat. After clearing his limp body and the placenta into a black bin bag, she went to sleep.
This week, for this unthinkable crime, she was found guilty and sent to prison.
The heartbreaking and disturbing case of Paris Mayo and her baby, Stanley, has shaken all who hear of it. Rarely does one hear of such a tragic murder going hand-in-hand with sympathetic coverage of the perpetrator, however. Paris, aged 15, had been in clear denial as to her pregnancy. Shocked and traumatised, she gave birth alone in her bathroom, terrified that her parents would hear and discover the pregnancy. And so, she killed her baby. Such are the circumstances of her trauma, that many commentators question if a twelve-year jail sentence is really fair for a young girl committing such terrible deeds in a state of clear panic.
The sentence has been handed down only weeks after another woman was jailed for a similar crime. Carla Foster deliberately suffocated her eight-month-old child in utero with mifepristone abortion pills, which are intended for self-directed use during only the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. She had lied about the length of her pregnancy on the phone with abortion provider BPAS. Making no attempt to check the accuracy of her claim via ultrasound, nor examining whether she might have been suffering any medical complications, BPAS sent her pills in the post — an act of sheer medical recklessness.
At eight months pregnant, the only “choice” abortion pills offered Carla was whether to give birth to a live baby or a dead one. She chose the latter. After delivering her daughter — whom she later named “Lily” — Carla was distraught with regret and haunted by the face of her viable, sentient baby, capable of feeling the pain of her death, who would easily have survived and thrived in the world had she been delivered alive at that stage.
For killing baby Lily, Carla received a prison sentence of four years.
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