{"id":672837,"date":"2026-07-04T04:30:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/672837\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T04:30:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T04:30:19","slug":"pregnancy-as-a-motive-for-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/672837\/","title":{"rendered":"Pregnancy as a Motive for Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

The night she was poisoned, Jade Benning<\/a> dialed her oldest friend. Nijaiha Jackson had known her since they were 6. On the phone, Jackson heard Jade ask the man in the room with her what he had put in her drink. She heard Jade say, \u201cBlaise, you\u2019re scaring me.\u201d He didn’t answer her question. <\/p>\n

Benning was five months pregnant. Paramedics found her face down without a pulse. She died nine days later, on her twenty-fifth birthday, the daughter she planned to name Ivy already gone. The father-to-be was Blaise Taylor, a former NFL scout who had told several people he did not want the child. On July 1, 2026, after about two hours of deliberation, a Nashville jury convicted him of two counts of murder.<\/p>\n

Killing a pregnant woman is not a rare event. Homicide is one of the leading causes of death<\/a> in pregnancy<\/a> in the United States. During pregnancy and the weeks just after birth, a woman is more than twice as likely<\/a> to be murdered as she is to die from any medical reason, including hemorrhage and hypertension. The person most likely to kill her is a current or former partner. <\/p>\n

Half of these killers have a history of domestic violence<\/a>; the other half do not. It is this latter group I want to describe because they run on a different logic and are often harder to spot. This man is not a batterer who finally goes too far. He does not want to control her or punish her for leaving. He is trying to get rid of the baby, and killing her is how he does it.<\/p>\n

A Motive That Was Never About Her<\/p>\n

Taylor\u2019s case has far too many precedents. Donovan Faison<\/a> shot his pregnant girlfriend, Kaylin Fiengo, in the head after she refused an abortion. Tristian Jones<\/a>, secretly married to another woman, stabbed his pregnant girlfriend, Eboney White, to death. Others aim at the baby instead: a lawyer<\/a>, an Army captain<\/a>, and a federal employee<\/a> each slipped abortion drugs into a partner\u2019s drink, trying to end the pregnancy without killing her. <\/p>\n

Each is a different man with the same goal: to get rid of the baby they believe is standing between them and the life they want. Some work in secret. Others use a gun or a knife. Either way, it is the baby he wants gone. Against that, the woman’s life weighs nothing.<\/p>\n

Rage<\/a> appears to have little to do with it. He is trying to get rid of what he views as an intolerable problem. Most problems a man like this can manage: deny, delay, pay his way out, walk away. You can do none of these with a baby. A pregnancy runs on a clock he cannot stop. It will produce a child who is provably his. And, in his view, it was set in motion by someone else\u2019s decision. <\/p>\n

For a man whose sense of himself rests on control and reputation, that is not an inconvenience. It threatens everything: a career<\/a>, a marriage<\/a>, a name. Taylor came from a prominent football family and was about to start working for his father. The more this man has to protect, the more he will do to make his “problem” disappear.<\/p>\n

The Moment She Becomes the Target<\/p>\n

The mother-to-be is in danger the moment she makes it clear that she is keeping the baby. <\/p>\n

Jade Benning was not trying to trap Blaise Taylor into a relationship. Theirs was a brief, on-and-off, dating<\/a>-app romance. When she chose to keep the baby, she offered him the exit he had asked for. \u201cI will not involve you at any point,\u201d she wrote him. \u201cI will love this child unconditionally with or without you.\u201d It was not enough. She could release him from a father\u2019s duties, but not from the fact underneath them: a child would still exist who was his. The threat was never the relationship or the money. It was the baby.<\/p>\n

Her offer to be a single parent changed nothing. She, not he, had decided to have the baby. She has refused to hand him the power to make that decision. She has made it clear that he does not get the final vote. From that point, the only way left to end it ran through her. <\/p>\n

Why a Clean Criminal Record Is No Guarantee<\/p>\n

Plenty of men are not thrilled by a surprise pregnancy. Most of them are harmless, and many adjust and become fantastic fathers. How he first responds matters much less than what he is willing to do when he cannot make the baby go away. He presses her toward an abortion. When she says no, he gets colder or more insistent instead of letting it go. <\/p>\n

Pregnancy Essential Reads<\/p>\n

He talks about the baby only as a threat to his money or his name, never as a child they share. Then the arguing stops, and the quiet is not the relief it looks like. <\/p>\n

The one with the most at stake is the least able to see it, too close, too quick to explain the coldness away, too slow to read a man she trusts as a threat. Others see it more clearly: the sister, the friend, the obstetrician. The pattern is real, and they may be the only ones who catch it in time.<\/p>\n

Jade Benning had already chosen. She was keeping her daughter, with him or without him, and she had told him so. It was her decision to make. He killed her for making it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The night she was poisoned, Jade Benning dialed her oldest friend. Nijaiha Jackson had known her since they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-672837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}