Much of the recent infanticide news has focused on Virginia, where there was simply a proposed bill to allow abortions up to or even after (!) the birth of a child. What doesn’t seem to garner as much attention is the fact that New York already passed and enacted basically the same law. And now, that legislation has led to what appears to be a gross case of the law of unintended consequences. (At least I hope they’re unintended. Is this a feature or a bug?)

A District Attorney in Queens has dropped one of the criminal charges against Anthony Hobson who was arrested on Friday and charged with the death of his pregnant girlfriend, Jennifer Irigoyen. He’s still being charged with murder, but an additional charge over the death of Irigoyen’s unborn baby has been dropped. Care to guess why? If you said it’s because of New York’s new infanticide law, give yourself a cookie. (New York Post)

Prosecutors initially included a charge of abortion against the Queens man arrested Friday in his pregnant girlfriend’s murder — but rescinded it because of Gov. Cuomo’s new Reproductive Health Act.

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown sent out a press release saying Anthony Hobson, 48, would be charged with second-degree abortion as well as murder in Sunday’s fatal stabbing of Jennifer Irigoyen, 35.

But a DA spokeswoman later The Post that the abortion charge “was repealed by the Legislature, and this is the law as it exists today.”

So when Hobson was initially taken into custody, the DA was going to charge him with the murder of his girlfriend and also file a charge of Second Degree Abortion. (Yes, that’s what the law was called.) But part of the new infanticide law that Governor Andrew Cuomo just signed “removes abortion from the state’s criminal code and puts it into public health law.” This was the stated reason the District Attorney gave for dropping the second charge.

If I’m reading this correctly, one would presume that if someone shoots or stabs a pregnant woman in the belly and she survives, but the baby dies, they will only be eligible for a charge of attempted homicide. This would seemingly apply even if they admitted their intention was to end the pregnancy by violent means. And the maximum penalty for that is one heck of a lot lower than a murder or homicide rap, at least in New York.

Did anyone think this through before that law was drafted? Passing legislation supposedly aimed at lifting restrictions on abortions (performed by doctors) surely couldn’t have been intended to legalize the killing of children in the womb by actual murderers, could it?

No matter where you come down on the issue of legal abortions, this has to be unacceptable. I realize that New York is a lost cause when it comes to attempting to reason with the liberal Democrats who run the state on a host of issues, but there can’t be any serious people out there who think this is okay. That law needs to be rolled back and retooled immediately, or Andrew Cuomo and his party should be held accountable for not only legalizing infanticide in doctors’ offices but the deliberate murder of the unborn by criminals out in the streets.