On Monday 24 August, Lucy Letby became only the fourth woman in UK history to be sentenced to a whole life term, for the most appalling crimes against tiny children. As we struggle to comprehend how a healthcare professional, tasked with caring for premature infants, could be capable of such evil, it is worth posing a less widely considered question relating to Letby and the recently exonerated Carla Foster.
Why is the mainstream media happy to depict Lucy Letby as a ‘moral monster’, while Carla Foster is viewed, with equal conviction, as a victim of the system, a woman who should have never been imprisoned in the first place, unjustly sentenced – so the argument goes – under antiquated laws? To be clear, such a comparison is not based on any similarity of character; it is not really about the personalities involved at all. What is of interest is the nature of the crimes both women were accused of, and why one is now in prison and one is not.
The details of the Letby case have been scrutinised for months, and the awful reality is this: seven babies killed and six more attempted murders between June 2015 and June 2016. Her victims were premature infants, born needing extra care and support in their first weeks of life outside the womb until they developed to a stage where they could thrive independently of medical apparatus and treatment. The dependence, vulnerability, and helplessness of these babies is what made their destruction by poisons or physical assault all the more disturbing.
Join the movement to end abortion: www.cbruk.org/join
The unanimous condemnation of Letby’s actions has not extended to Carla Foster’s decision to kill a child, this time her own, through the deliberate administration of poison in the form of a freely available abortifacient. Lily Foster was a minimum of 32 weeks old when she was killed – a similar age to the babies Letby killed, likely older than some of Letby’s victims. She was equally dependent and vulnerable, although well past the age of viability.
