Indiana woman sentenced to 20 years in prison for feticide. The inevitable result of aggressive anti-abortion laws.

Courtesy of New York Magazine:  

In a ruling that’s already caused uproar across the country, Purvi Patel was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison for committing feticide. Patel, a 33-year-old woman from Indiana, was accused of illegally inducing her own abortion and subsequently having a baby she allowed to die. Last July, Patel visited an emergency room with severe bleeding and eventually told doctors she’d miscarried. When questioned about the location of the fetal remains, she said she was unsure what to do, so she wrapped the fetal remains in a bag and threw the bag in a Dumpster. Patel was then living with her conservative Hindu parents and in a relationship with a married co-worker, which helps explain why she felt it necessary to hide the pregnancy and dispose of the remains so quickly. 

While Patel has maintained that she miscarried and delivered a stillborn baby, prosecutors insisted that she induced a late-term abortion with pills she ordered on the internet and gave birth to a living fetus that died almost instantly. A toxicology report produced no evidence of such drugs in her system, but prosecutors pointed to texts Patel exchanged with a friend in which she claimed to have ordered pills from a pharmacy in Hong Kong. Because the age of the fetus was heavily contested, it’s possible that had she gotten a prescription for the pills in the U.S., the pregnancy termination (if that’s what happened) would have been legal. It remains illegal to order such pills online. 

If Patel did self-induce an abortion, it’s essential to understand the legal restrictions she faced as a resident of Indiana. The state has only 11 abortion clinics and an exhaustive list of abortion restrictions. Indiana prohibits certain qualified health-care professionals from performing abortions, restricts young women’s access to abortion by requiring parental consent, subjects abortion providers to targeted (and burdensome) regulations not applied to other medical professionals, subjects women to biased counseling and mandatory delays, has passed unconstitutional bans on abortion, prohibits certain state employees and organizations with state funding from referring women to abortion services, restricts access to other reproductive health care, and restricts low-income women’s access to abortion.

The article goes on to question the case against Patel, including expert medial testimony that at 24 weeks the fetus was not viable, and would have died even if born alive. 

What we as a country need to recognize is that if the Republicans get their way this will become a much more common occurrence, and soon women will be arrested for miscarriages that happen even during the first trimester of their pregnancy, without any evidence of wrongdoing on the mother's part.

In the conservative world women were created to give life. And failing that biological imperative, they have no real value.

And in their world the fetus is the most precious of all lives, far more important than the life of a woman who cannot even manage get pregnant or give birth correctly.

That is why their focus is not only making it impossible to get an abortion, but even doing away with birth control itself.