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Miscarriage? Face Prison Time For Murder
Did you know that US women are currently facing prison time for murder after suffering miscarriages and stillbirths?
At least 38 states have introduced “foetal homicide laws” and around 300 women in South Carolina alone have been arrested for suspected actions that may or may not have occurred during pregnancy.
In one case, a woman’s unborn baby was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome and she declined the doctor’s suggestion to abort. Her baby died after a premature birth and six months later she was arrested at home and retroactively charged with “chemical endangerment” during pregnancy. She denied taking drugs and there was no evidence, but she faces 10 years behind bars.
This casts a strange dynamic to the abortion debate but the excuse for such criminalization is unfairly placed on advocacy groups who seek to redefine laws to state that life begins at conception. Abortions are generally legal and such groups would not want to encourage more by having women face threat of prison for going full term versus early termination. These laws hold women liable for pregnancy outcomes and punish for suspected intentions. They can voluntarily terminate but if a miscarriage occurs it’s a “depraved-heart murder”?
It appears it’s not about human life so much as it is about how homicide laws are defined and widely applied. This also wreaks of the ever growing profitable, privatized prison complex.
~Health Freedoms
Outcry in America as pregnant women who lose babies face murder charges
Women’s rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion.
Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.
Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death – they charged her with the “depraved-heart murder” of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.
Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.
“Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws,” said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). “It’s turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights.”
Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.
Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.
In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes.
Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way. During her pregnancy her foetus was diagnosed with possible Down’s syndrome and doctors suggested she consider a termination, which Kimbrough declined as she is not in favour of abortion.
The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth.
Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with “chemical endangerment” of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.
“That shocked me, it really did,” Kimbrough said. “I had lost a child, that was enough.”
She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars. “I’m just living one day at a time, looking after my three other kids,” she said. “They say I’m a criminal, how do I answer that? I’m a good mother.”
Women’s rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion, in which conservative prosecutors are chipping away at hard-won freedoms by stretching protection laws to include foetuses, in some cases from the day of conception. In Gibbs’ case defence lawyers have argued before Mississippi’s highest court that her prosecution makes no sense. Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.
“If it’s not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is,” Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer asked the state supreme court.
McDuff told the Guardian that he hoped the Gibbs prosecution was an isolated example. “I hope it’s not a trend that’s going to catch on. To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme.”
He pointed out that anti-abortion groups were trying to amend the Mississippi constitution by setting up a state referendum, or ballot initiative, that would widen the definition of a person under the state’s bill of rights to include a foetus from the day of conception.
Some 70 organisations across America have come together to file testimonies, known as amicus briefs, in support of Gibbs that protest against her treatment on several levels. One says that to treat “as a murderer a girl who has experienced a stillbirth serves only to increase her suffering”.
Another, from a group of psychologists, laments the misunderstanding of addiction that lies behind the indictment. Gibbs did not take cocaine because she had a “depraved heart” or to “harm the foetus but to satisfy an acute psychological and physical need for that particular substance”, says the brief.
Perhaps the most persuasive argument put forward in the amicus briefs is that if such prosecutions were designed to protect the unborn child, then they would be utterly counter-productive: “Prosecuting women and girls for continuing [a pregnancy] to term despite a drug addiction encourages them to terminate wanted pregnancies to avoid criminal penalties. The state could not have intended this result when it adopted the homicide statute.”
Paltrow sees what is happening to Gibbs as a small taste of what would be unleashed were the constitutional right to an abortion ever overturned. “In Mississippi the use of the murder statute is creating a whole new legal standard that makes women accountable for the outcome of their pregnancies and threatens them with life imprisonment for murder.”
From protection to punishment
At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.
South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.
In other states laws designed to protect children against the damaging effects of drugs have similarly been twisted to punish childbearers.
• This article was amended on 27 June 2011 to remove an unsuitable subheading
Ed Pilkington in New York
Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges
http://kasamaproject.org/2010/02/27/in-utah-miscarriage-homicide/
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If hese women are being arrested for ‘Chemical Deaths” then can these laws allow pharma companies to be charged with chemical murder as infants , fetuses and children do die in record numbers from the aluminum, mercury, embombibing fluids, polysorbates, peanut products injected into them in the form of vaccines? A lot of fetuses died from this years flu and swine flu shots given to pregnant moms. Can the new Canary Party go after the Pharma indutry? 1 in 6 children now has a Developmental Disability. This was not the case when kids got 7 vaccines in a lifetime (before 1989) but is the case as they now get 69 vaccines before age 7. What say you???
This is being done to control women. No one has determined how the foetus can live outside the womb, and anything a woman does that does not suit the male idea of correctness, will be considered an attempt at proventing a birth of the child. Since a foetus does not have a soul or spirit until the moment of birth, the religious right needs to get their noses out of women’s wombs and their business. God did not give the right to punish another for what you decide is sinful. infants die suddenly because the soul that chose this incarnation changed her mind.
As for the increase in autism, blame the use of DDT which takes years to manifest the genetic damage done in the 1930s thru to the 1960s. Please read ‘A silent Spring’ for documentation.
Mother and Father God are trying to help us love others, because the love us all. Humans cause hate on earth, and this is the hell so many people worry about for the future.
Have you shared your love today???
Federal, state and local “governments” consume 48% or more of our GNP. These “laws” and MILLIONS like them are the result. My mother used to tell me “idle hands are the devils workshop”. Tens of millions of government bureaucrats are sitting around with NOTHING to do but harass
and imprison us.
The USSA imprisons 50% more people than Communist China with a population four times ours.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg/300px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg.png
Shrink “government” increase happiness.
ps. Don’t worry about all those prison beds they will soon be filled with “homegrown terrorists” and “dissidents”.
I am against abortion. If someone attacks and beats up a pregnant mom and the baby dies, the attacker should certainly be prosecuted. This is NOT the case. I am extremely horrified that innocent women are being charged for murder when they are INNOCENT. Our human rights and our great nation are being destroyed turning America into a living hell for the innocent. We must have huge street protests all over America. We cannot allow such profound evil against innocents. I hope street protests will be organized. I never heard of this before and I’m sure most people don’t know about it. We are rapidly losing our freedom in America. We must fight for our sisters against this terrible injustice.
but yet Casy Anthony murders her child and gets away with it
WHAT??? What the hell is going on? Women who suffer a miscarriage or still birth have already undergone a very difficult situation and now they can be arrested?? Who the hell passed this one? Oh wait – a man, right? No one knows why still births or miscarriages occur. They cannot definitively be blamed on anything even drug abuse. Thousands of women who are drug addicts give birth to live babies every day. This is ridiculous *reasoning*.
When I attempted to post this story to my own web site, I got a message that said, “Web site is trying to close this page.” Is there some hacking go on already?
Sorry folks but this is what happens when we pass special laws for special circumstances that effect a small segment of society. Fetal Homicide laws were created to protect pregnant women and the unborn child from violent attacks usually committed in a domestic dispute and now it is being used against the pregnant woman. We already had laws that prosecute the offender that commits a violent crime. Our society has gone in a direction of no return. Laws don’t protect anyway. Laws have never stopped crime. Now, America has gone into a direction of policing ordinary citizens. It is not going to stop. Just check your state. It does not matter where you live. Lobby groups are pushing state governments all over this country with their agendas under a veil of concern for it’s people.
What this does is punishes drug users. Just another way to wage the “war on drugs”. They do not care about these mothers or what they have gone through nor do they care about these dead children. Of course we all know this. But, one other thing this may be is a way to slow down population growth through fear of criminal prosecution for what may or may not happen if one chooses to have a child. This could just make people think twice about having kids which could help with the reduction of the populace. Again, it all leads back to sovreignty (control). That is what its all about.
i agree women should not be punished because they have lost thier baby.. its not fair.. any ways a 15 yer old girl is not even considered old enough to agree to have sex.. let alone decide anything else on thier own.. so how long before they start charging the parents of these teen moms with the same thing because the teen lost a baby… when does it end.. if the person didnt stab themselves in the belly or do something like that to kill the baby.. if thier is no proof that she ment to harm the baby them leave her alone… miscarriages and stillborns happen.. are they gonna start arresting for SIDS too? how about kids who need transplants are they gonna blame the parents for that too? this law has to stop.. too many people are going to jail for something that cant be helped.. its wrong