A horrific murder trial in North Carolina has a father accused of brutally beating his newborn son to death after his girlfriend refused to have an abortion.
The Gaston Gazette reports Robert Middleton, of Gastonia, North Carolina, is on trial this week for first-degree murder in the death of his infant son, Deville Ahmaad Middleton. He also is facing abuse charges for allegedly abusing Deville’s twin brother, Davale, who survives.
On Monday, the boys’ mother, Takaylia Young, told the court about meeting Middleton on Facebook in 2018 and later moving in with him. When she became pregnant about a year later, she said Middleton told her to get an abortion, according to the report.
“He wasn’t too happy about it,” Young said. “He said we’ll have to get an abortion.”
Afraid of not being able to support a baby on her own, Young said she gave in and aborted their first child; then, she became pregnant a second time.
“I was shocked at first,” she said of the news that she was pregnant with twins. “But I was really excited about having two babies.”
Middleton did not feel the same way, though, and Young said they “argued a lot about keeping the boys,” the report continues.
Assistant District Attorney Debbie Gulledge told the court that Middleton began abusing the twins less than two weeks after they were born on May 17, 2020.
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Here’s more from the report:
One weekend, the boys stayed alone with Middelton, and Deville “seemed off” after that, and his sleep schedule changed, Gulledge said in court.
Young took Deville to an eye doctor appointment, and from there he was taken to the hospital, where he was found to have a skull fracture and bleeding in his brain.
Devale was then taken to the hospital, and he was found to have similar injuries. He survived, but Deville did not.
However, Middleton’s defense attorney Joshua Kellough said the cause of the twins’ injuries is not clear. Middleton told police that the injuries were because he dropped Deville at one point and, another time, bumped into a wall while holding him, according to the report.
Many women face pressure to abort their unborn babies, sometimes from employers or social workers, and others from partners or parents. Coercion sometimes is coupled with abuse, and both mothers and their babies are abused and sometimes killed because the mother resisted pressure to have an abortion.
A 2014 study, “Associations Between Intimate Partner Violence and Termination of Pregnancy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” published in the journal “PLOS Medicine,” found that intimate partner violence, including history of rape, sexual assault, contraception sabotage and coerced decision-making, was associated with abortion.
Another study by the Elliot Institute found a high rate of coerced and forced abortions among post-abortive women, as high as 64 percent. And a recent BBC survey found 15 percent of women of childbearing age in the UK felt pressured to have abortions that they did not want.
