(Staff)   A Toronto murder has renewed the debate on the personhood of the unborn child.

On Oct 2, Aysun Sessen, who was seven months pregnant, was fatally stabbed in the abdomen by her common-law husband. Her child was stillborn after an emergency Caesarean section. Nonetheless, Turn Cocelli, 29, was charged with only one count of murder—Aysun’s.

Under the Criminal Code, to be recognized as a person “a being has to be born and take a breath, basically,” said Detective Sergeant Gary Grinton of the Toronto homicide squad.

Besey Sessen, Aysun's father, disagrees. "There should be two charges."

"Two people were killed in this tragedy, mother and baby,” said Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition, the political arm of the pro-life movement in Canada. “The age of the child doesn't matter anymore than the age of the mother."

Last year Conservative MP Leon Benoit introduced Bill C-291 that would have made it a separate criminal offence to harm an unborn child when the mother is assaulted or murdered but it was defeated.

According to LifeSite News, a Freedom of Information request into the affair found that the Conservative Government had quashed the measure even though it was raised by one of its own members. Justice Minister Vic Toews was warned in an unsigned briefing note on C-291 from government bureaucrats that, "Any change to the definition of a 'human being' in the Criminal Code could have the effect of criminalizing abortion." The note went on to state, "The government has no plans to propose any reforms in this area of the law."

Benoit's bill was launched after 19-year-old Olivia Talbot was murdered in Edmonton while pregnant with her child, Lane.

Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, told the National Post, “We’re being ostriches with our head[s] in the sand pretending that the baby doesn’t exist.” She explained, “Not to draw any lines, which is the case at the moment, or to draw the lines pretending we’re not dealing with a human life, warps our moral intuitions.”

In a high-profile case in California in 2002 Scott Peterson was convicted of two counts of murder--one for his wife Laci, who was eight months pregnant, and another for their unborn child. Thirty-five American states recognize the fetus as a crime victim in homicides or feticides.