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Old 06-26-2011, 10:42 AM   #1
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Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Murder Charges In U.S.

Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Murder Charges In U.S.

Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion

SOURCE

guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 June 2011 18.30 BST

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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."
Miscarriage of justice

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 is criminal, cruel and corrupt.
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Old 06-26-2011, 03:07 PM   #2
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What have I said? Pro-life is more about controlling and especially punishing women for so called "irresponsible" behavior than the life of the infant.

Not to call out a guy who's already admitted he was wrong and has sense moved on but WHAT was Versus concerned about when he weighed in on the abortion discussion? Was it babies lives?

No. He was concerned about preventing women from "Behaving irresponsibly" and wanted to saddle these imaginary abortion skanks with a baby to teach them a lesson (because THAT's a good reason to bring a child into this world and raise it to age 18, PUNISHMENT.)

I really can't stand pro-lifers, specifically because they're so intellectually lazy, dishonest, and even when unaware of it, really horrible examples of human beings.

This shit is a direct result of their warped, sickening thought process.
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Old 06-26-2011, 03:16 PM   #3
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I directly blame religious culture.
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Old 06-26-2011, 03:23 PM   #4
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Fuck those anti-abortion cunts! It's pathetic that there are people out there who want to tell others how to live so much so that they would send innocent people to jail.

Drug users are bad. Women who want to control their own reproductivity are bad. People who don't believe in marriage are bad. Fuck that shit. With all of the energy people spend on trying to force others to live their way they could be getting high and fucking till day break. I know what *I* would rather do...

This kind of reminds me of all of the cheering that went up from all of those pro-life idiots when that abortion doctor was murdered. I think it was late-term abortions he performed? Anyway, a bunch of dickholes were cheering despite the fact that he only performed said late-term abortions to save the life of the mothers if carrying the child to term put her at risk. I know there are a lot of intelligent people in our country, but they always seem to get shouted down by the mouth-breathing wankers.
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Old 06-26-2011, 03:39 PM   #5
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Okay....not to start shit or anything, but why would someone with antideluvian ideas like "women behaving irresponsibly" and having abortions in an abortion thread date a feminist?

Maybe he no longer holds those opinions?
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Old 06-26-2011, 03:43 PM   #6
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I read this article a few days ago. Appalling.
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Old 06-26-2011, 03:57 PM   #7
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I saw it too but kept putting off posting it here, thanks Ben.

I grow increasingly worried The Handmaid's Tale might actually happened, and this is a big step in that direction.
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Old 06-26-2011, 04:27 PM   #8
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Okay....not to start shit or anything, but why would someone with antideluvian ideas like "women behaving irresponsibly" and having abortions in an abortion thread date a feminist?

Maybe he no longer holds those opinions?
Despanan said that the guy admitted he was wrong.
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Old 06-26-2011, 05:14 PM   #9
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Fuck me, I guess he did. That'll teach me to leap before looking next time.

*herpderp*

Nothing to see here folks...

Sorry, Versus.
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Old 06-26-2011, 05:24 PM   #10
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I directly blame religious culture.
I agree. In Georgia they are trying to spawn roomers of eugenics against black people. Its like the black tea party
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Old 06-26-2011, 05:57 PM   #11
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Thing is, historically religion doesn't have a lot to say about abortion. In Judaism, you don't gain a soul until you take your first breath, in Islam, when the fetus is around four months old. The Bible says fuck all about it except in the laws of the Old Testament, where if a woman is assaulted and she miscarries, the assailant can be taken to court by her husband and forced to pay reparation. Only if the woman is killed is it considered murder, and eye for an eye applies. Christianity once had a similar belief, although I think it might have been three months. In America, it was legal before "quickening", when you first start feeling kicks and such. When suffragists started organizing, thats when abortion became outlawed, to deny women rights and to push back and take rights they had before in an attempt to silence them and keep them in their place.

I once read an article by a theologian who said that anti-choice protests became more intense in the 1980s, when groups like Operation Rescue formed. It had more to do with the fact that they were losing the battle against no-fault divorce, and were in fear of losing the tradition of woman as virginal wife. Anti-abortion provided a chance to again force women to adhere to patriarchal values and emotionally manipulate people into thinking they're murdering innocent babies. You can't do the same with issues like divorce, you can't say "divorce hurts families!" when people in families can talk back and say they're better because of it. Fetuses however can't talk back and tell you they aren't sentient. And, well, if women don't want to be forced to have babies then they shouldn't have been sluts.
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Old 06-26-2011, 07:33 PM   #12
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That's all well and good (and very informative, thanks Saya), except the patriarchal culture we have wouldn't be so obsessed with the virginal wife to begin with without religion.

Go to an anti-choice rally. Sure it's misogynistic and patriarchal, but above all it is RELIGIOUS. The Moral Majority (which also formed and gained a TON of steam in the 80's) is religious. The religious texts you bring up are RIFE with patriarchal apologism, misogyny, and straight up LAWS declaring that a woman's place is at the feet of her husband. It is right there in black and white, I can give you verse after verse after verse.

Besides, the oppressive Right today is religious. These people evoke religious imagery and call on God to justify their insane quest to keep women barefoot and pregnant and everyone else beholden to the bronze-age laws passed down by their invisible dick in the sky.

Whether or not religion is the CAUSE of this behavior, (and I would argue that yes it IS at least one of the biggest causes) Religion is the vehicle by which this ideology grows, perpetuates itself, and exerts coercion over the political process; and in many ways it is the ROOT of this psychology.
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Old 06-26-2011, 07:50 PM   #13
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Not disputing that religion is patriarchal, what I'm saying is that when it comes to the abortion issue, religion doesn't have much of a leg to stand on, at least Abrahamic religions, and it has more to do with keeping women down and regulating their sexuality than it has to do with God.

And they even appeal to those who aren't religious, they appeal to anti-racists by saying that abortion doctors target black women, they try to appeal to feminists by saying abortion hurts women (Sarah Palin and those who exploit Susan B. Anthony's ambiguity over abortion say the real feminist position is anti-choice) men's rights groups by saying "men don't have any say in the issue! Where's their choice?" and just about everyone by saying that sluts are murdering babies, all in a bid to try and keep "traditional American values" alive. Religion helps to perpetuate these views, but I don't think I ever had to argue about abortion with a religious person on Gnet before, and only once or twice in person.

I think patriarchy and anti-feminism will be around regardless of religion, but religion gives conservatives the organizations that a lot of leftists don't have, and legitimacy for being fucking troglodytes who'd rather hold on to privilege than progress into a better society.
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Old 06-26-2011, 08:08 PM   #14
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I don't think Despanan would dispute your other points but I'm not ready to say that religion is actually just a fashionably late afterthought that isn't even remotely considered.

I'd agree that there's several reasons why there's anti-choice groups, but I'd wager that religious culture is what ignites a lot of it. It would make sense, would it not? You said yourself that religion is patriarchal as hell, it would only draw the conclusion that religious culture is a pretty big player in the whole thing.

I'm sure in Cananadaland, religion isn't really one of the driving forces for it, but you can't deny it in Americaland.
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Old 06-26-2011, 08:10 PM   #15
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I grow increasingly worried The Handmaid's Tale might actually happened, and this is a big step in that direction.
You know, Saya, when I first became aware of that book, I thought (like much many works of satire, parody and allegory) that it was touching on some important issues by painting the extreme picture. I had no belief that reality would ever come close to resembling the radical dehumanization of women that the story portrays.

Now, I've joined you with the worry.

It's been a roller coaster couple of days. Yesterday I was celebrating CSTS L.A. and the announcement that in five years Can't Stop The Serenity has raised over $500,000 for Equality Now. Then I read this, and think how is that anywhere near enough money to fight this battle.

*sigh*
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Old 06-26-2011, 08:28 PM   #16
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I don't think Despanan would dispute your other points but I'm not ready to say that religion is actually just a fashionably late afterthought that isn't even remotely considered.

I'd agree that there's several reasons why there's anti-choice groups, but I'd wager that religious culture is what ignites a lot of it. It would make sense, would it not? You said yourself that religion is patriarchal as hell, it would only draw the conclusion that religious culture is a pretty big player in the whole thing.

I'm sure in Cananadaland, religion isn't really one of the driving forces for it, but you can't deny it in Americaland.
All I'm saying it isn't religion alone. In Canada its the Evangelical Conservatives who have a problem, but they know they're in the minority so religious language isn't used in legal and political discourse, and they know what a shit storm there would be if Harper makes any move to make it harder to have an abortion. I think its religion + patriarchy + conservatism that makes such a bad combination in the states, progress, change, any kind of leftism is demonized. In Canada, most churches realized they had to become progressive to survive, but in the US there's far less value placed on social progress, and there's a pride taken in being so backwards, and patriarchal society allows it to take its toll on women.
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Old 06-26-2011, 08:42 PM   #17
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Yeah, I was going to say that Canada is not even close culturally to America. You can't really use Canada as an example for American politics.
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Old 06-27-2011, 12:27 AM   #18
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Abortion is one of those topics like same sex marriage the right-wing only roll out when they want to shore up their base. The reality is, they could care less, but they know it kicks off a controversy and will radicalize their base against any compromise on any other topics.

It's sad to see when it moves from this into actual practice and shows how far they are willing to go to further their goals. They are all for getting rid of the government, except when it comes to babies, minorities, and homosexuals, then they think people should be directly controlled by the government. What they are basically saying is as long as your a white middle class or better protestant type, we think you should be above the law. Everyone else needs to follow a strict code of conduct which the aforementioned group will force you to abide by.
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Old 06-27-2011, 06:21 AM   #19
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Silly G.netters. Don't you know the moment a woman becomes pregnant, it's only right that she become a walking government meatsock? With all her rights suspended in devotion to the safety of the almighty Holy Grail that is the fetus?

I think they should take it further. Women shouldn't be allowed to drive, run, work, walk, they should spend all their days laying flat on their back, with her only meals being force fed smoothies designed to give the fetus perfect nutrition.

In fact, let's just leave women like that all the time, pregnant or not. We can strap their legs open gyno-style in case their husband ever wants to get his dick wet. But remember, it should only be for reproduction. /imad
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Old 06-27-2011, 06:22 AM   #20
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Silly G.netters. Don't you know the moment a woman becomes pregnant, it's only right that she become a walking government meatsock? With all her rights suspended in devotion to the safety of the almighty Holy Grail that is the fetus?

I think they should take it further. Women shouldn't be allowed to drive, run, work, walk, they should spend all their days laying flat on their back, with her only meals being force fed smoothies designed to give the fetus perfect nutrition.

In fact, let's just leave women like that all the time, pregnant or not. We can strap their legs open gyno-style in case their husband ever wants to get his dick wet. But remember, it should only be for reproduction. /imad
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Old 06-27-2011, 06:34 AM   #21
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Oh geez, Doobz wants us to go back to the Victorian Era!

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Old 06-27-2011, 08:25 AM   #22
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Sorry, Doobie, but there's just no way to treat this with satire or sarcasm that highlights the truth any more painfully or communicates the problem any more vividly than just reading that story with an open heart.
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Old 06-27-2011, 09:02 AM   #23
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I can't abide this. What can one do to help?
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Old 06-27-2011, 09:25 AM   #24
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Sorry, Doobie, but there's just no way to treat this with satire or sarcasm that highlights the truth any more painfully or communicates the problem any more vividly than just reading that story with an open heart.
Not much else to say.

Seriously...

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Old 06-27-2011, 09:59 AM   #25
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I can't abide this. What can one do to help?
Well, I was looking for some political action projects specific to this issue and couldn't find one at either N.O.W. or Equality Now, but for the most part they are engaged in the bigger battles (believe that?) that women face in this country right now. Perhaps someone else can suggest better resources.

But this seems like a starting point to me:

Women's Rights Must Be Guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution
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