On July 28, Darlene Haynes, 23, was found dead in Worcester, MA, and the story of this gruesome crime dominated American media for several days. On July 29, Julie Corey, 35, was arrested for the crime of killing Haynes so that Corey could take Haynes’s fetus alive and claim it was her own child. Several hours before the news story of Corey’s arrest broke, I predicted on Wendy McElroy’s forum that when the killer was caught we would learn that the killer was a woman.

I did not make this prediction cavalierly, nor in any attempt to be flippant. I simply recognized a story that seemed all too familiar: A pregnant woman is killed and her fetus is taken from her alive, and in each case the criminal was a woman. I came to call this type of crime “fetal ripping” because I found no one else who saw this pattern. Fetal ripping is the grotesque violent crime of killing a woman to steal her still-living fetus. Many women have been killed along with their fetuses (Scott Peterson’s case is a prominent example of that), but in this article I want to discuss the specific pattern of pregnant women who have been killed for the purpose of taking their still-living fetuses.

Part of the purpose of this article is to remove the veil of moral protectionism from women that prevents women from advancing themselves as individuals. It temptingly shields women with a false image of innocence that women do not commit violent crimes, or at least do not commit violent crimes for the same reasons as men. I do not want to vilify women; most women are decent people, just like most men. I do want to show several other examples of fetal ripping, and then ask readers why no one in the news media seems to have discovered the pattern that fetal ripping is always committed by women.

Araceli Camacho Gomez, 27, was tied up and stabbed to death by Phiengchai Sisouvanh Synhavong in 2008 in Kennewick, WA. Synhavong called 911 , claiming that she had just given birth in a parking lot and the baby was dying.

Jimella Tunstall, 23, was killed in Illinois in 2006 by Tiffany Hall, 24. In this case, Hall killed the fetus after it was removed alive. Hall drowned all three of Tunstall’s children.

Bobbi Jo Stinnett, 23, was strangled in Kansas by Lisa Montgomery, 36, in 2004. Montgomery met Stinnett in an online chatroom where Montgomery claimed to have been pregnant, so she discussed her “pregnancy” with the truly pregnant Stinnett. Another member of the chatroom, Nancy Strudl, suspected that Montgomery was never pregnant, and the lack of actual pregnancy is the reason Montgomery met Stinnett to strangle her and rip her fetus out to “prove” Montgomery’s own pregnancy.

Carolyn Stimpson, 21, was shot to death in Oklahoma by Effie Goodson, 37, in 2003. Goodson had convinced her husband she was pregnant and had to produce a baby.

I applaud all readers for looking at new claims with a skeptical eye, and a skeptical reader may point out that I only provide five examples of fetal ripping and may therefore wonder if I have truly discovered a pattern. I would like to point out that the most famous serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper, killed only five women. Therefore, I argue that five women killed for the same reason by people fitting the same profile—in this case women—displays a pattern worthy of study.

I do not want to frighten pregnant women into believing that this pattern shows that they should be afraid of other women, at least not more than pregnant women should be afraid of men. I do understand that the pattern of feminism has veered into such a paradigm that men are violent and women are not that Erin Pizzey and Susan Steinmetz were both marginalized and vilified by feminists for claiming that a particular type of violent crime—domestic violence—is not a male-caused crime, but one in which women can be guilty as often as men. Perhaps more discussion of fetal-ripping can help us open up the broader discussion about how all women who become violent criminals do so through choice, just like all men who become violent criminals, and this will help clear the air on the entire discussion of gender and violence.