Milwaukee woman cut full-term fetus from mother’s womb, attorney claims

A Milwaukee woman has been charged with murder for cutting a full-term fetus from its mother's womb in an attempt to steal the baby.

Annette Morales-Rodriguez faces two counts of first-degree homicide after she allegedly used an Exacto knife to cut the fetus from Maritza Ramirez-Cruz, 23, on Thursday, according to U.S. news reports.

Reuters reports:

Neither the mother nor the baby, a boy, survived.

Morales-Rodriguez had been faking a pregnancy and "panicked as her supposed due date grew near," attacking Ramirez-Cruz with a baseball bat and then cutting out her full-term fetus, Fox New reports.

Morales-Rodriguez told detectives that her boyfriend wanted a son but she couldn't get pregnant, Fox reports, citing a criminal complaint. 

The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, which is reporting the story as a case of "fetal abduction," quotes a next-door neighbor, Keila Perez, as saying said Morales-Rodriguez had been "talking about pregnancy for months," and buying a car seat, a changing table and baby clothes. She had even shown a sonogram of a boy that she said was in breech position.

According to a district attorney's complaint cited by several media outlets, Morales-Rodriguez had looked for two weeks for a suitable victim. She spotted Ramirez-Cruz outside a nonprofit organization that provides Hispanics with health care and offered her a ride to a nearby drug store.

She lured the victim back her house, let her use the bathroom, and set upon her with a baseball bat when she emerged.

After using duct tape on her mouth, hands and feet, she tried to cut the fetus out "at the bikini line, attempting to duplicate the process she had seen on the Discovery Channel, depicting a Caesarean section birth," Reuters cites the complaint as reading. 

She then reportedly smeared some of Ramirez-Cruz's blood around her thighs "to make people think she herself was bleeding from giving birth," Fox reports, and called the paramedics to report that she had just given stillbirth to a child.

After an autopsy revealed that the baby wasn't the product of a natural birth, police returned to Morales-Rodriguez's house and took her back to the hospital, arresting her after an examination verified she hadn't given birth.

Morales-Rodriguez faces mandatory life in prison if convicted. She made a brief court appearance Monday, standing silent as her bail was set at $1 million, and was back in court Oct. 19 for a preliminary hearing.. 

Ramirez-Cruz, already a mother of three, had moved from Puerto Rico to join her childhood sweetheart, Christian Mercado, his father told Fox.

According to the Milwaukee-Wosconsin Journal Sentinel, a study into the "phenomenon of fetal abduction" in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, entitled "Fetal Kidnapping by Caesarean Section" documented eight cases in the U.S. dating back to 1987. 

Reuters reports that:

Similar cases of women taking an unborn child from a mother's womb were reported in Massachusetts and Oregon in 2009, in Pennsylvania in 2007, in Illinois in 2006 and Missouri in 2004.