A US Navy officer has been convicted of murdering his girlfriend who was pregnant and refused to have an abortion.
Emmanuel Coble murdered his girlfriend Raquiah King, aged just twenty, in 2022 after she refused to abort their child. Her body was left by the side of a road in the state of Virginia after being shot. She was 12 weeks pregnant at the time.
King had previously told her mother that, if anything bad happened to her, Coble was responsible. Coble had paid for an abortion at Planned Parenthood, which King declined. An angry Coble then murdered her, which he later admitted to in court.
Navy Lt. Junior Grade Coble was found guilty on all charges, including the murder of a pregnant woman with intent to terminate the pregnancy, and the premeditated killing of an unborn child.
He will be sentenced in July.
The brother of King said that his sister was “a ray of sunlight; she was fun, beautiful, courageous, and strong”.
A man in Canada was also recently found guilty of murdering his pregnant girlfriend who did not want to have an abortion. The man kept calling the unborn baby a “parasite” and said, “I just want it dead and gone.”
Similarly, in the UK, Filmon Andmichaen was sentenced to a minimum term of 27 years after being found guilty of murdering his girlfriend and her unborn baby in 2023.
Mr Andmichaen stabbed Liwam Bereket, 26, when she was 27 weeks pregnant. She had also resisted having an abortion.
The prosecutor in the case told the jury that Mr Andmichaen “decided the life growing inside his girlfriend was a complication he was unwilling to accept… His solution to this was a permanent one.”
In 2022, a poll of British adult women found that 15% of respondents had experienced some form of pressure to have an abortion that they did not want.
A separate poll conducted on behalf of SPUC in 2021 reported that more than eight in ten GPs (86%) were concerned that women were being put at risk of being coerced into an abortion by a partner or family member because of the DIY abortion scheme introduced in 2020.
SPUC has been raising awareness about the shocking reality of abortion coercion in the UK and abroad, including briefings and an event for MPs at Parliament. For more facts about coercion, visit SPUC’s dedicated page by clicking here.
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