An Indiana jury says Purvi Patel should go to prison for what she says was a miscarriage PRI’s The World http://www.pri.org March 13, 2015 · 2:15 PM EDT Reporter Amy Gastelum [Purvi Patel faces up to 70 years in prison after being convicted of feticide and child neglect in Indiana.] The Abigail Adams Brigade post tackled this issue yesterday, March 14, 2015.

It starts. Life imitates Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Scary. The doctors can tell from all the blood loss, attached placenta and age of the fetus that Patel had a spontaneous abortion, i.e. miscarriage, but since she falls under the not-one-of-us ‘alien’ label, send her off to prison. If anything she should have been charged with improper disposal of a dead body. 

NPR did a piece on a story similar to this story: a young woman in a scary Roman Catholic Latin American country, I think that it was El Salvador, was prosecuted and convicted for having a spontaneous abortion. This is becoming real life.

Petra E. commented on AAB: While disturbing that the law exists, it’s even more disturbing that they prosecuted this case under the law. The fetus was believed to have been 23 – 24 weeks gestation, at the very edge of viability for any pregnancy. No evidence of abortion-inducing drugs was found in either mother or fetus (not to mention these are not shown to be effective this late in pregnancy). Prosecuting this case makes no sense at all. It’s hard not to wonder how much the defendant’s status as part of a marginalized group may have influenced its outcome.

This is exactly what I eluded to in my first comment Petra: well off/well connected women can and do miscarry w/o repercussion but someone foreign of a lower class or a minority will feel the full weight of these laws. I also believe that the states that push these types of laws are states with for-profit prisons. In Patel’s case they charged her with feticide and abortion. She must have had a very weak defense lawyer not to counter with proper forensics – at least it sounded that way when NPR reported it.

I believe that it was St. Augustine or the other saint, Thomas Aquinas, both Doctors of the (RCC) Church which were considered THE faith’s major policy (truth) makers, and women haters, I get them mixed up, that wrote doctrine identifying The Virgin as being the only chaste, subservient, and worthy woman, all the rest of us were and are Eves, lustful, sinful and imperfect. We are to blame for all that is wrong in the world and all religions (except the Wiccan religion) in their zeal to please their God(s) try their best to ostracize women into being silent ignorant fetus mules. And if we are beyond childbearing we are considered useless crones. I sound like a Debbie Downer but I have grown up with this pall over my head since the ERA amendment failed to get ratified – I’ve been waiting for Karma to kick butt … more women have to raise their voices and vote out these MISINFORMED and women hating male chauvinistic law makers.