In Texas, a 14-year-old girl was raped by a member of her own family and then beaten to induce abortion after he realized she was pregnant. The beating lasted six grueling hours and the teen told police that she was a virgin when she was assaulted. Additionally, reports reveal that the young girl was eight months pregnant when she was attacked.

Now Dallas News reports that the four relatives involved in the induced abortion, Cedric Jones, Sharon Lee Jones, Lonnell McDonald, and Cecila McDonald have been charged with engaging in organized crime. Prior to the beating, Sharon tried to induce abortion by first giving the girl Plan B emergency contraception, multiple does of birth control and cinnamon tablets.

However, when that didn’t work Cecilia held the girl down while Lonnell sat on the girl’s stomach, repeatedly pounced on her abdomen and kicked her multiple times. Apparently Lonnell laughed as he beat her and Cecile told the girl, “You ain’t about to get my kids taken away from me.”

Then, another member of the family, Cedric Jones, walked in on the attack and Lonnell told him “he had already been kicking the “s**t out of the b***h.” Unbelievably, Cedric agreed to dispose of the baby’s body after the miscarriage when Lonnell offered him 25$ to “take care of it.” Originally, the family tried to burn the child’s body on a charcoal grill but when that was unsuccessful, Cedric threw the remains away in a plastic bag.

This attack highlights the importance of laws like the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which hold criminals accountable when they kill or injure unborn children in violent crimes. Thankfully, under Texas’ 2003 Prenatal Protection Act, the protections of the entire criminal code extend to “an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” This means that prosecutors in Texas can bring murder charges against criminals when they kill an unborn child in a violent attack against their mother.

In a separate incident, in 2012, a Texas man was charged with capital murder after he killed his unborn baby by attacking his girlfriend. He was told that he could face the death penalty since Texas law provides that if a murder is committed in the course of committing another felony, it automatically becomes a capital case.

Unfortunately, in states like Colorado where protective laws aren’t in place unborn babies who die in criminal attacks don’t receive the justice they deserve. As LifeNews reported, earlier this year a perpetrator escaped a murder charge after cutting a seven-month-old unborn baby from a woman’s womb in Longmont, Colorado. This is because their state’s criminal law defines a person, when referring to the victim of a homicide, as a “born” and alive human being at the time of the attack.