Pa. Man Charged With Threatening 'Home Abortion' in Domestic Dispute
A Pennsylvania man is being charged with threatening a "home abortion" after engaging in a domestic dispute with a pregnant woman.
Kelton McClarrin, 23, of Oil City in northwestern Pennsylvania was charged by Franklin police Sunday with assault of an unborn child and terroristic threats, among other crimes, after he allegedly hit a pregnant woman in the face using the back of his hand and then dragged her out of bed in the early morning hours on Sunday. He then reportedly punched the woman, who is four-and-a-half months pregnant, in the stomach and threatened to give her a "home abortion" while brandishing a knife.
According to the Associated Press, online records indicate that McClarrin has yet to receive an attorney to represent him in his charges. His preliminary hearing for his alleged crimes will take place Jan. 8.
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In a similar story from earlier this year, Florida man John Andrew Welden was charged with murder after he tricked his pregnant girlfriend into aborting her 7-week-old baby by disguising an abortion-inducing drug as an antibiotic to treat an infection. The woman, Remee Jo Lee, 27, suffered a miscarriage in March 2013 after she took the disguised medication, unaware it would harm her unborn child.
"I wanted this baby more than anything," Lee told ABC News earlier this year. "Not because it was Andrew's, but it was my baby as well."
Welden accepted a plea deal in September after he admitted to tricking his girlfriend into taking the abortion-inducing drug. Sentencing for the 29-year-old man was postponed in early December.
A psychiatrist for Welden has suggested that a crippling bipolar disorder clouded his judgment when he prompted his girlfriend's miscarriage, while his friends have said that the young man was panicked because he wanted to leave Lee, whom he had met at a strip club earlier in the year, for another woman.
Welden's court-ordered guard wrote in a letter to the defendant's judge that the young man feels remorse for his actions. "I have seen him, watched him and listened to him express sorrow while praying at the dining room table with his father and family," security officer Lenny Bogdanos recently wrote to U.S. District Judge Richard A. Lazzara, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times.
