THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER

Compiled By Heidi M. Pascual

• National Religious Summit

ATLANTA — The NAACP held its ninth National Religious Leadership Summit in Atlanta Nov. 15-17. NAACP President and CEO Kweisi Mfume said the aim of the summit was to explore and strategize post-election plans and fiscal and membership opportunities, so that “people throughout this country will be equipped for successful social, political, and economic activism.” The conference included a special town-hall meeting that was open to the public, followed by a late night worship service. —NAACP

• Murder dramatizes common danger

NEW YORK (IPS/GIN) — Scott Peterson's recent guilty verdict culminated nearly two years of sensational news coverage, one of the highest-rated TV movies, and thousands of Internet postings. The world was gripped with the idea a man could kill not only the woman he married, but the child he conceived. Unfortunately, that scenario is not so rare.

Murder is the number-one cause of death among pregnant women, according to a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and usually the pregnant woman is killed by an intimate partner.

Josie Slawik’s pregnant daughter was beaten by the father of her baby just last year.

"I thought she would have learned through me," says the elder Swalik, whose then-husband Tony sent her to the emergency ward with early labor pains after a beating.

As she is witnessing her daughter's situation, Slawik recalls the doctor who treated her many years ago saying he saw "so many women coming in here like this." Slawik says her family's history of pregnancy-related violence is like many she hears at the National Domestic Violence Hotline in Austin, Texas, where she now works.

Pregnancy can often trigger jealousy, says Jackson Katz, a domestic violence educator with Northeastern University in Boston. He says men can also become resentful when the woman's attention turns to the coming child. An unwanted child further escalates risk, as the abuser may fear the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Being pregnant made then-24-year-old Slawik vulnerable in other ways, too.

"It gave him more control, knowing I wasn't able to go to work," she says now. "Who was going to hire me when I was pregnant? He knew I couldn't leave."

She was also so concerned with protecting her womb that she couldn't deflect punches to the rest of her body or fight back.

Slawik says she stayed with her husband for all the reasons battered women commonly cite: his threats to kill her, then his feigned remorse. But the pregnancy added another powerful incentive: Like many abusive fathers, Tony threatened to take her child away. Finally, after three years of battering, Slawik went to the police and then divorced him in 1978.

Jacquelyn Campbell, a family-violence specialist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore, says her research shows expectant mothers are not more at risk for battering and that abusers often stop during the pregnancy. But those who don't stop, she said, “are particularly dangerous, and it is a sign of increased potential for homicide."

Campbell argues that doctors should screen all women for signs of abuse during prenatal exams and follow up post-partum for those cases in which the abuse resumes after the child's birth. Like many women's advocacy groups, Campbell does not embrace the only legislative "cure" attempted so far: The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which is also known as "Laci [Peterson] and Conner's Law".

Signed by President Bush last April, the law allows a pregnant woman's assailant to be charged with two crimes: one against her and one against the fetus. Abortion-rights groups opposed the bill, which was sponsored by Republicans with strong backing from the National Right to Life Committee. Rights advocates warned it was political ploy aimed more at giving a fetus protection from abortion than at preventing domestic violence.

Campbell is concerned is that the law could be used to punish mothers whose drug habits or other behaviors jeopardize the fetus. She also doubts  its effectiveness.

"It's already illegal for men to beat their wives. It's already illegal for them to kill people. Deterrence is not the issue," she says.

Peterson's jurors will be sequestered at the end of November to decide his punishment. His first-degree murder verdicts for killing his wife and his second-degree murder verdict for killing the fetus she carried could lead to the death penalty or to life without parole.— Gretchen Cook

END OF NATIONAL NEWS