Every morning at 7 a.m., I get up and watch the Today Show. Yesterday morning, I heard this: “a young woman, eight months pregnant . . . found murdered on Monday. Twenty-three-year-old Darlene Haynes was discovered in the closet of her Worcester, Massachusetts apartment—her fetus had been taken from her womb.” I immediately checked to see if the channel had somehow been changed—it certainly sounded like the beginning of an episode of Law and Order: SVU.

Nonfamily infant abductions may be rare, but they do happen. And in some cases, they can turn violent. According to AJN’s September 2008 article, “Nonfamily Infant Abductions, 1983-2006,” which compared cases from 1983–1992 with those from 1993–2006, from the earlier to the later period the preferred abduction location changed: the percentage of infant abductions from health care facilities decreased, while the percentage of those from private residences nearly doubled. In 22 of the 247 cases studied, the mother was killed, and in nine of the 22 cases, a cesarean section was performed to remove the fetus from the womb, as occurred in the Darlene Haynes story. […]

"The death of a pregnant woman is always heartbreaking, and unfortunately we have been hearing reports of otherwise healthy women dying from H1N1. If a pregnant woman feels like she may have influenza, she needs to call her healthcare provider right away," said CDC’s Dr. Denise Jamieson, lead author of the study. “Clinicians who treat pregnant women should have a system in place for triaging pregnant women with influenza-like symptoms and they should not delay in initiating appropriate antiviral therapy. Some clinicians hesitate treating pregnant women with antiviral medications because of concerns for the developing fetus, but this is the wrong approach. It is critical that pregnant women, in particular, be treated promptly. "