The American justice system is anything but just when it comes to people of color — and the same holds true for women. This past year alone, several politicians have proposed anti-choice bills that would limit abortion in such ways as banning all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and requiring any woman seeking an abortion to first procure the notarized consent of the child’s father. On March 30, the justice system further impinged on women’s reproductive rights when 33-year-old Indiana resident Purvi Patel had a miscarriage and was sentenced to 20 years in prison as a result. With this, the anti-choice campaign has transformed into more than just a flawed movement for protecting the unborn — it is now a movement for punishing the pregnant.
First, I would like to note that not all people with vaginas identify as women, and that not all those who identify as women necessarily have vaginas. The term “women” is used only in the interest of space and readability.
The tragic story began when Patel was rushed to the emergency room for loss of blood and doctors discovered a severed umbilical cord. Patel admitted that she had miscarried, putting the stillborn fetus in a dumpster to hide it from her very conservative Indian parents. Immediately, authorities arrived on the scene and arrested Patel. She was convicted for feticide for having attempted to abort the fetus, and then for child neglect for failing to care for the fetus after the abortion attempt failed.
These convictions, however, are based on unfounded assumptions. The only evidence that Patel had attempted an abortion came from text messages, in which she mentioned ordering abortion-inducing drugs. Yet, when toxicology tests were conducted, no signs of drugs were present in either Patel or the fetus. Furthermore, legal abortion is permitted in Indiana, so how could Patel’s attempts to terminate her own pregnancy be considered less valid — especially considering that Patel’s home in Mishawaka is about 145 miles away from the closest abortion clinic in Indianapolis? This is not an issue of legality. This is an issue of accessibility — an issue it seems anti-choicers have very deliberately created to make it more difficult for women to exercise their rights over their bodies and thereby put women into uncomfortable, distressing and even fatal situations.
This feticide charge is especially glaring when considering the law’s actual text. Indiana’s feticide law criminalizes the “knowing or intentional termination of another’s pregnancy.” Yet if Patel had attempted to terminate any pregnancy — a debatable claim — it was her own and therefore should not fall under this law. With this conviction, the anti-choice movement has reached its inevitable conclusion as not a quest to protect fetuses but, rather, an outright war on the women who carry them.
Even if the false feticide charge was founded, it makes no sense when combined with the child neglect charge. Feticide is the termination of an unborn fetus, while child neglect is failing to care for a baby that is born alive. If Patel had committed feticide, then there would have been no living baby to neglect. The two charges are fundamentally incompatible. Moreover, the child neglect charge was made on the basis of a scientifically discredited test called the lung floating test, in which whether a fetus was born alive or stillborn is determined by nothing more than the buoyancy of its lungs.
This is not the first time a woman has been arrested for miscarrying a fetus in Indiana. In 2011, a pregnant Bei Bei Shuai was suffering from depression and attempted suicide. She did not die, but the attempt did terminate her pregnancy. Instead of giving Shuai the mental help she needed, authorities arrested her for feticide. The arrests of Shuai and Patel reflect a system founded on internalized misogyny and a complete disregard for women’s rights and health where pregnant women are guilty until proven innocent, thereby discouraging women from seeking much-needed help from medical professionals and authorities.
There is also a racial component. Before Roe v. Wade, one out of four childbirth-related deaths for white women in New York City was due to abortion. For women of color, this statistic was one in two. Considering this, it seems like no accident that both women tried for feticide in Indiana have been women of color. As Sally Kohn astutely points out, “the result is that sexist infanticide laws are exacerbated by economic inequality and racial bias such that women of color are disproportionately penalized.” With this ominous precedent, women who have abortions and those who experience miscarriages alike can be subjected to investigation and incarceration, with women of color being even more likely to experience such clear overreaches of state authority.
Women face a disturbing reality in which their rights to their bodies are constantly being defined and denied by policymakers — most of whom will never experience pregnancy themselves. As Amanda Marcotte wrote in a Feb. 4 article for Slate, the laws that have supposedly been created to protect pregnant women, are being twisted to instead “punish [women] for failing to meet a social ideal of pregnancy more than any actual crime.” Pro-life is thus nothing more than a euphemism for anti-choice. I am pro-life, too, but that means pro-a woman’s life and everything that entails, including her physical, emotional and financial well-being — a sentiment that the justice system clearly does not share. Time is moving forward, but women’s rights are only falling more and more behind.
