It should give Indiana prosecutors pause
The Indiana Court of Appeals on Friday overturned the 2015 feticide conviction of Purvi Patel, the Northern Indiana woman whose botched, self-induced abortion became a flash point in the national debate over abortion rights.
In a 3-0 ruling, the judges said that the state feticide statute was not intended to apply to abortions, and legal experts said that — barring a successful appeal — it should give Indiana prosecutors pause before bringing similar charges against pregnant women in the future.
In its decision, the court relied heavily on how prosecutors have applied the feticide law in the past, noting that this case was an “abrupt departure” from its typical usage: cases in which a pregnant woman and her unborn child are the victims of violence.
“The state’s about-face in this proceeding is unsettling, as well as untenable” under prior court precedent, Judge Terry Crone wrote in the ruling.
The court also said that because many of the state abortion laws dating to the 1800s explicitly protect pregnant women from prosecution, it was a stretch to believe that lawmakers intended for the feticide law to be used against pregnant women who attempt to terminate a pregnancy.
They upheld the conviction for failing to provide medical care to the baby though.
Finally, courts are recognizing how extremist ‘fetal protection’ laws are. The religious and political right wants to dominate and control women’s lives and this must stop.
This case sounded like cases we hear about in Central and South America where women are routinely imprisoned. These countries are priest-ridden with the Catholic Church dominating their legal systems.
Let’s have none of this draconian nonsense here. We need to recognize and affirm the bodily autonomy of each woman, and the inalienable right for each woman to make decisions and choices about her own body. We do this by recognizing every woman’s agency, humanity, and human dignity. Imprisoning a woman for a miscarriage or an incomplete medical abortion, is punitive, immoral, and should be–always and everywhere–illegal.
No woman should have to have a self-induced abortion. Proper access to reproductive care should be available, and that should include the ability to terminate a pregnancy, whether for the health of the mother, or because the mother chose not to bear the child. It seems like such a small thing, really. Why is it so hard for people to understand?
It shouldn’t have to be this way, but there does seem to be a silver-lining to the insidious creep of incremental restrictions on abortion rights. IMO, these restrictions would be far more dangerous if they were being pushed by crafty, pragmatic groups set on minimizing legal abortions while maintaining an illusion of benevolence. Fortunately (in a relative sense), the people pushing them are greedy ideologues set on eliminating legal abortions altogether, with no compunction about being seen as the maleficent assholes they are. Far from crafty, they’re utterly lacking in the common-sense awareness that a strategy of endlessly throwing additional straws on the back of a camel called “undue burden”. They are almost amusing** in their cartoonish surprise at the inevitable camel’s collapse.
Of course, the demise of “undue burden” is no panacea. The ultimate question is the direction our 21st century society goes after its collapse: will the ideologues build a stronger camel, or will progressives finally win out by outlawing such straws once and for all?
**Not actually amusing, when one realizes that each of those straws represents needless suffering aimed at millions of women and transgender men over decades of time.