Pregnancy, violent death linked

Woman's murder points to disturbing, if murky, statistics

The news that Michelle Fisher Young had been beaten to death at her home in a quiet subdivision south of Raleigh was shocking enough. That Young was four months pregnant only made it worse.

But it's not all that unusual.

Homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women, according to some studies. Others have found it is a leading cause of death among pregnant women and mothers of newborns. Young, who expected to deliver a boy in the spring, was just the latest in a long list of women whose lives were cut short as they tried to bring a new life into the world.

"We view pregnancy as a special, protective time, so it's always shocking to think of the woman as being particularly vulnerable," said Sandra Martin, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health, who has studied abuse of pregnant women.

Wake County sheriff's investigators have said they have no suspects in Young's death, but they say the killing wasn't random. Detectives found no indication that a stranger forced his way into her Enchanted Oaks subdivision home; her 2-year-old daughter, Cassidy, wasn't harmed.

Researchers noticed in the 1990s that an unusual share of pregnant women who died were murdered. Because there is no uniform way to track whether a woman is pregnant when she dies, there are no definitive national statistics on the causes of death of pregnant women. But several researchers who have analyzed the pregnancy status and cause of death of women in certain regions have found that homicide was a leading cause of death among pregnant women.

But national studies probably aren't capturing all of the deaths of pregnant women and mothers of newborns, said Kay Sanford, an epidemiologist with the state Division of Public Health.

"The fear is that these are being woefully underreported," said Sanford, who will be studying the circumstances surrounding violent deaths of pregnant women and new mothers in North Carolina.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks the manner of death in women by age group, homicide does not rank as high as a cause of death among American women in general.

It is not clear why pregnant women are more at risk. Some researchers say the vulnerability of the pregnant woman might provoke abuse by a partner; others say that it is a sign of how rampant domestic violence in general is.

The full scope of the problem is not well-understood because of challenges in tracking the data. A Washington Post analysis of the problem in 2004 identified 1,367 murders of pregnant women since 1990, though more than a dozen states that didn't track maternal status were excluded from the tally. The Post chose to examine 2002 cases more closely and found that, in about two-thirds of those cases, the motive for the slaying had to do with the pregnancy.

Martin and other public-health officials recently launched a project to track the pregnancy status among women who died in North Carolina to better understand the problem. A search of newspaper articles in North Carolina identified nearly a dozen homicides of pregnant women since 1999.

Among them:

* In November 1999, Cherica Adams, eight months pregnant, was gunned down by a hit man. She died a month later. Doctors saved the baby. Her boyfriend, former Carolina Panthers football player Rae Carruth, is serving an 18-year term in prison for plotting to kill her.

* In 2003, April Greer's boyfriend slit her throat, sliced off her limbs and stuffed her in a garbage can before dumping her pregnant body in a field outside Burlington. She was eight months pregnant. Her then-boyfriend, Jerry Lynn Stuart Jr., is spending the rest of his life in prison for her death.