Tag: stillbirth

Criminal Pregnancies?

On By southwerkIn business ethics

i_192Criminal Pregnancies?

Is it wise to criminalize women who use drugs during pregnancy? You might think that would discourage women from going to doctors while pregnant if they are using drugs. While the state does have a “safe harbor” law (explained in the text below), a woman can still be charged in the event of a still birth.

More worrying is the idea of criminalizing conduct during pregnancy. What about smoking or drinking? or not eating right? or not following the doctor’s instructions? Once states start enacting laws along these lines, where is the bright line drawn that will stop further criminalization?

Criminalizing anything is an important decision. It would make for a better judgment on the matter if data, studies for instance, was sought before such laws were passed. This one was a rush job. That is seldom a good idea. The passage of a little time after a controversy makes for a better decision.

James Pilant

Tennessee legislature passes bill to criminalize pregnancy: Women who have stillbirths after using illegal drugs may be charged.

Prosecutors have become quite fond of stretching the reach of child abuse and even murder laws to punish pregnant women for failing to deliver live or healthy babies, usually because those women used drugs during pregnancy. (Though not always.) Often the fact that the laws being used to prosecute are clearly not meant to address what women do to their own bodies while pregnant causes the cases to collapse. For instance, a recent Mississippi case I wrote about involving a mother charged with murder after her baby was stillborn was tossed out by a judge who ruled that the law wasn’t meant to apply to situations such as hers.

Well, the Tennessee legislature decided to fix this problem by passing a bill through both houses that would give prosecutors broad rights to press abuse charges against women who use illegal drugs during pregnancy and then give birth to unhealthy or stillborn babies. According to RH Reality Check, if the governor of Tennessee signs the bill, it will be the first law like it in the country. The law is a reaction to the passage of the Safe Harbor Act last year, an actually good bill that allows pregnant women with drug problems to seek treatment with the knowledge that Child Protective Services will not take their babies away because of it. (The women do have to stick to the program to keep that assurance.) But law enforcement insisted on retaining the right to throw a woman in jail—even if she has stuck with the treatment program—if the baby is born with problems and they decide that it must have been the drugs that did it.

via Tennessee legislature passes bill to criminalize pregnancy: Women who have stillbirths after using illegal drugs may be charged..

From Around the Web.

From the web site, The Free.

http://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/amerikka-poor-women-get-jail-for-stillbirths/

To paraphrase George Dubya: misogynists never stop thinking of ways to harm women, and neither does America. The latest joyous news from the motherland (a term I use advisedly) is that troubled women are being prosecuted for murder after suffering miscarriages or still-births. This is more than insane. It’s baffling. Despite the pro-life palaver America doesn’t generally give a damn about post-natal child welfare………

……..Rennie Gibbs was just 16 when her baby was stillborn. The state is trying her as an adult, for murder, alleging that the still-birth was caused by cocaine use. For some mush-headed moralists this is enough (“What kind of terrible human being takes drugs while pregnant?” etc.) Before galloping off on their high-horse, however, they should consider the fact that all sorts of things cause miscarriage and still-birth. As the Gibbs brief notes:  People wrongly believe that women have a high degree of control over their pregnancy outcomes. The longstanding and constant medical reality, however, is that as many as 20-30 percent of all pregnancies will end in miscarriage or stillbirth.

Not just crackhead pregnancies, teen pregnancies, women-of-colour pregnancies, or unwed pregnancies – all pregnancies. Including those of law-abiding suburban wives who drive SUVs and take their vitamins. The difference is the latter are more likely to get flowers than be slapped with a murder charge. The Gibbs brief spells it out: “Low income women… [are] particularly vulnerable to punishment” (italics mine).

A Womb with a View?

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice

i_192A Womb with a View?

In Kansas, legislation is under consideration that will require doctors to report all miscarriages to the state health department.

One would think a womb would be more private.

This information could be used as an investigative tool for prosecution of the mother for harming or killing the fetus as in the Mississippi case of Rennie Gibbs. This could mark a new approach to diminishing women’s reproductive rights. Medical problems like miscarriage can be converted from personal medical problems to law enforcement issues. And, of course, once an investigator begins looking at a possible prosecution all the other medical records have to be examined as well.

The marginalization of women has been principally embodied in culture and custom. But now through the magic of legislation, it’s one woman at a time, one reproductive system at a time. In 2013, the idea of invasive ultrasounds ran its course but like all its ilk is only awaiting the right moment to return.

In the past, a woman’s reproductive system was considered a matter of some privacy. Now, it is an arena for manipulating, prosecuting and even mythologizing women. Manipulating by putting women in fear of their conduct during pregnancy, prosecuting by actively seeking charges against women for reproductive “felonies” and mythologizing by making women sacred hosts, carriers of genetic treasure; who must be treated with the utmost respect – and regulated.

It’s second class citizenship writ large. Right now, it’s a slow laborious chipping away at the base of women’s equality. The intent is clear – control. Once patriarchy is the rule, women and their issues will no longer be problems. Equal pay, child care, family leave, voting, reproductive rights, all will disappear into those subjects not covered by the media, not discussed in the restaurants and private clubs of the beltway, and not manipulated for political contributions in the halls of power.

Women’s rights are a continuing struggle. Women will not gain equality in our lifetimes and just holding on to the rights possessed now will be difficult. The current tool to put women in their “place” is fetal personhood. What the next one will be is germinating in the minds of those to whom women’s natural functions are paramount over their status as human beings.

James Pilant

From around the web.

Walsh, S. (2014, March 26). If stillbirth is murder, does miscarriage make pregnant women into criminals?. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/stillbirth-murder-miscarriage-pregnant-women-criminals
Seven and a half years ago, a Mississippi teenager named Rennie Gibbs went into premature labor and delivered a stillborn baby girl named Samiya. Initially, experts attributed the baby’s death to the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But when traces of a cocaine byproduct showed up on the autopsy report, a medical examiner declared the stillbirth a homicide and cited cocaine toxicity as the cause. Shortly afterward, the 16-year-old Gibbs was charged with murder, specifically “depraved heart murder”, a charge that can carry a sentence of up to 20 years to life in prison.

Since her grand-jury indictment in 2007, Gibbs’s team of attorneys has been fighting for the charges to be dropped on both technical and legal grounds. The defense argues that there’s no scientific proof that cocaine use can cause a stillbirth – and that the “depraved heart murder” statute did not apply to unborn children at the time of Samiya’s death. A decision is expected any day now as to whether the Gibbs case will finally proceed to trial or get dismissed. If it does go to trial, and Gibbs is convicted of murder for being 16 and pregnant, then a dangerous precedent may be established that should make anyone with a uterus feel very afraid.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/stillbirth-murder-miscarriage-pregnant-women-criminals

From around the web.

Marcotte, A. (2014, March 26). Kansas moves to defund planned parenthood and force doctors to report every miscarriage. Slate, Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/26/kansas_moves_to_defund_planned_parenthood_and_force_doctors_to_report_every.html

It’s not just women who are trying to avoid pregnancy who are under attack in Kansas. A bill winding its way through the state’s legislature would require doctors to report all miscarriages to the state health department, no matter how early they occur in a pregnancy. The requirement was tacked on to a bill that was supposed to be about reporting stillbirths, and it is so extreme that even some anti-choice Republicans have balked. It’s clear that this amendment is about conflating early pregnancy loss with post-20 week fetal demise and stillbirth. “The whole point is to further the idea of the fetus as a person. It’s a way of establishing the groundwork for making abortion harder to get, and eventually illegal,” Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute told ThinkProgress. Currently, no state requires doctors to report miscarriages early in pregnancy, because they are a common and usually minor medical issue.

What’s troubling about the bill is that it’s a needless invasion of a woman’s privacy, and it would reinforce the dangerous idea that the mere act of failing to complete a pregnancy is so serious that it requires state intervention. We’ve already seen states making moves to criminalize women for stillbirths, even when the evidence suggests that the woman’s behavior had no impact on the pregnancy’s outcome. We also know that if a woman terminates a pregnancy by taking misoprostol she bought on the Internet, that doesn’t actually look any different from a regular early term miscarriage. Cataloguing every woman who has an early term miscarriage opens the door to investigating women who officials suspect might have deliberately caused those miscarriages. There’s already been one woman prosecuted for inducing an early term miscarriage in just this way, so it’s certainly possible that such a law could result in women having to endure criminal investigations if they dare show up at a hospital miscarrying at eight weeks. Just from your life experience, you know that’s a lot of women.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/26/kansas_moves_to_defund_planned_parenthood_and_force_doctors_to_report_every.html

From around the web.

Marcotte, A. (2014, February 24). Virginia lawmaker calls pregnant women “hosts”. Slate, Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/24/steve_martin_of_virginia_on_abortion_state_senator_calls_pregnant_women.html
In text citation: (Marcotte, 2014)