Pregnancy as an aggravating factor that increases a woman's chance of being murdered?

Annie get your gun-- the world is not quite safe for your pregnancy. So the murder of pregnant women by husbands and ex-lovers has become quite trendy. Another case in Texas just made the news. The details are frighteningly unremarkable:

Underwood, seven months pregnant, and her son were reported missing Saturday after she failed to show up at her baby shower. A pool of blood was found in her Fort Worth home, but there was no sign of forced entry, police said.

Acting on an anonymous tip, police had searched a Fort Worth home during the night and found an item referred to by the tipster, but officials would not say how it figured in their investigation.

Police did not immediately establish a motive for the killing, Jones said.

"We know that at one time Mr. Barbee and Ms. Underwood were romantically involved. We don't know what the latest status of that relationship was," he said.

Jones said he didn't know who was the father of Underwood's fetus, but a neighbor of Underwood, Debbie Lindley, said it was Barbee. Underwood and Barbee met about two years ago but split up last fall because Barbee had another girlfriend, Lindley said. She didn't know of any violent incidents between the couple.

According to experts Diana Cheng and Isabelle Horon, this surface placidity hides myriads. In a 2001 Maryland study to determine the leading cause of death among pregnant women from 1993 to 1998, Cheng and Horon found of the 247 women who died while pregnant, homicide was the leading cause of death, accounting for about 20 percent of the cases.

NOW President Kim Gandy thinks the murder of pregnant women is perfused with attempts to demonstrate masculine power. On Gandy's view:

"Violence in intimate relationships is all about power...There are fewer times when you can have power over a woman than when she's pregnant. She's vulnerable. It's an easier time to threaten her."

So does pregnancy factor into a woman's increased likelihood to be the victim of domestic violence? Not quite clearly. While the stats are discomforting-- 7% to 26% of pregnant women are physically abused-- it is difficult to tease out the variable effects across a wide spectrum of violent behavior that may or may not lead to death for the victim.

According to a 2003 study in the American Journal of Public Health, a batterer's unemployment, access to guns and threats of deadly violence are the strongest predictors of female homicide in abusive relationships. On the other hand, little ones still enter the statistical picture, since having a child in living in the home who was not the abusive partner's biological child also contributed to intimate partner homicide – more than doubling the risk, according the Risk Factors for Femicide.

For less violent yet still vivid examples of men not liking the fairer sex, see some of the anonymous comments on Mens News Daily,  or read news about fine, upstanding Christan men who despise women, or watch Celia Kitzinger revisiting the Garden of Eden in search of a kinder snake.

Oliver Wendell Homes' of females is slightly kinder: "When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?"