June 9 issue — It was nearly Valentine’s Day, 1992, when Tracy Marciniak’s estranged husband, Glenndale Black, showed up at her Wisconsin apartment. A 28-year-old mother of two, Marciniak was expecting another baby in just five days. But the night was hardly romantic. Within hours, the two argued and Black punched her in the stomach.

“IT FELT LIKE IT had gone all the way through me,” says Marciniak, now 39. The baby, whom she’d already named Zachariah, had seemed fine on a prenatal visit just the day before, she says. But when she arrived at the hospital that night, doctors couldn’t find his heartbeat. Marciniak pulled through, but the baby did not.

Because Zachariah was not considered a “born person,” prosecutors could not charge Black with homicide. They attempted to try him under an old state law banning illegal abortion, but Black’s lawyer argued that the baby would have been stillborn anyway. In the end, a jury convicted Black of reckless injury and sentenced him to 12 years in prison. Though Marciniak has long supported abortion rights, she became furious when she discovered that the law didn’t protect her unborn son—and that women’s groups wouldn’t back her quest for a state law punishing his killer. Now she is allied with the National Right to Life, appearing in an ad for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act. “There were two victims,” Marciniak says. “He got away with murder.”