Fetuses Covered Under Massachusetts Homicide Law, Top Court Says

Personhood rights extend to a fetus that is killed as a result of the homicide of a pregnant person, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Tuesday.

The opinion contributes to the nationwide debate around the extent to which fetuses are entitled to the same rights as people. That question is of growing importance now that the US Supreme Court has overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.

Even if someone doesn’t directly injure a fetus when they kill a pregnant person, they should be charged with two murder convictions rather than one, the Massachusetts court said.

The justices declined the opportunity to overturn precedent the court set in Commonwealth v. Cass (1984), which found that a viable fetus is a person in the context of motor vehicle homicide.

Convictions Affirmed

A jury found defendant Peter Ronchi guilty for the first-degree murder of his girlfriend and her full-term fetus in 2009, for which the court imposed consecutive life sentences.

Ronchi asked the Supreme Judicial Court to reverse those convictions, based in part on his belief that it should not be up to the court to decide “at what point, if ever, a fetus attains personhood for the purposes of the law of homicide,” he said in a brief.

The fetus wasn’t injured when he stabbed his girlfriend, Ronchi said. He claimed that the fetus’ death as a result of its mother’s loss of blood shouldn’t subject him to a first-degree murder conviction.

The court disagreed.

“The defendant’s contention that the fetus was uninjured by the stabbing of (his girlfriend) is strained at best,” the opinion stated.

“The defendant committed an act of violence against a woman who was nine months pregnant, repeatedly stabbing her,” the justices said. “By ending the mother’s life, he destroyed the viable fetus through the cessation of life-sustaining maternal blood flow.”

The court said it has sole jurisdiction to apply the “common-law definition of murder,” and that its ruling in Cass doesn’t exceed the judiciary’s authority.

The justices affirmed the jury’s convictions.

The case is Commonwealth v. Ronchi, Mass., No. SJC-13043, Opinion 2/14/23.