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ABC Movie of the Week: Women In Chains 1972 by flashbacks.com
There has always been a Rubicon in the abortion debate. It is a line that even the hardest of hard core forced pregnancy advocates would not cross, at least not in public. That is making it a crime for a punishable by jail time for the woman that has an abortion.
Sure they are willing to have the doctors locked up on felony charges but they always seem to know that the public relations nightmare of advocating for locking up women if they seek out an abortion has kept the anti-choice groups from really embracing this idea.
Now it seems there that there is a backdoor way of making this an acceptable norm. The English newspaper The Guardian has a great round up of this problem.
You see there is a tragic and growing trend, where states are using the fetal homicide laws, not to add to the prosecution and incarceration of those who might attack pregnant women, but instead for women whose children are either still born or who miscarry.
As you might expect some of these cases have to do with taking drugs while pregnant. Even if it is unclear or there is no evidence linking the drug use to the lose of the child, women have been charged with murder. Take the case of Rennie Gibb of Mississippi.
She was 15 when she became pregnant. The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at 36 weeks. It was when the prosecutors found that she had a cocaine habit they decided that they would charge a minor who lost a baby and had a problem with drugs with murder, more than that, they charged this child with what is called there a “depraved heart murder”. This type of murder is basically saying that someone died because the perpetrator had a depraved indifference to human life. Oh, and it carries a mandatory life sentence.
While Ms. Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder for the miscarriage of her pregnancy sadly she is not the only one in the nation. There is the case of 34 year old Bei Bei Shuai, who tried to kill herself when her boyfriend left her alone and pregnant. She took rat poison.
She was 33 weeks pregnant at the time. She was rushed to hospital and was saved. She gave birth to a little girl named Angel later that week. Angle lived four days, then died. She has been in police custody, charged with murder and attempted foeticide. She has been held without bond.
These are horrible perversions of justice. Mainly for a single reason, it is legal in all of these states to terminate a pregnancy, but it is somehow illegal to perform acts or take substances that would cause the same ending of that pregnancy?
The other shocking unjust thing is that none of these women intended to terminate their fetus. These things all happened outside the idea of ending a pregnancy. They were drug users or despondent abandoned women.
In many crimes there is a need for intent. If you accidentally burn down your friends house, it is not arson, it is an accident. The same is you strike someone with your car and kill them, that is not murder that is manslaughter.
These women and many like them are being charged as murderesses because of the pernicious laws meant to expand the definition of personhood earlier and earlier in pregnancy so as to strangle the rights to choose to control their reproduction.
They are also having the affect of slowly but surely normalizing the idea that an unborn fetus is so much more valuable to society than an adult female citizen that if that women chooses to go around unconscionable restrictions, she and the doctor could be locked up, and it would be considered “just”.
I find those who want to forcibly control women’s reproductive choices less than the scum you scrape off your shoes. I did not think that these zealots could stoop any lower, but I should have known better. I am completely and totally disgusted by these tactics, to the point that I wish I thought there was an afterlife with a Hell, so I could know they would be sending a good long time next to the hottest fire.
What is on your minds tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours.
11 Comments
Great post, Bill. I’ve been predicting this would happen.
So why hasn’t Sarah Palin been brought up on charges for endangering TriG in her wild ride back to Alaska well after her water broke? He was special needs, with perceived heart problems, and she had had two miscarriages. Were she Black, Latina or another minority politician, she would have been crucified politically, perhaps criminally, for that stupid decision.
I am just waiting for a Romney/Palin/Bachmann/Perry et al. cabal to run the show and make it illegal to use a prophylactic.
“Use a rubber and go to jail”
If a woman can be legally charged with murder for suffering a miscarriage.
Then employing a prophylactic is equivalent to a retroactive abortion even before the 46 little buggers had a chance to dance-same result-scratch one potential gamete.
If you can legally do one, hold on to your Trojans (and I ain’t talking USC and to that I give a huge fight on SC), you only have to be patient to see the other become law.
How about compulsory sex during periods of maximum, potential fertility?
If the genius and sheer intestinal fortitude which the founding fathers brought to bear to create the greatest bill of rights of the common man that the world has and will ever see and risked all to do so, can we do any less?
Emulation is the most sincere form of compliment.
ONce you dig just a little bit, you expose the ugly misogyny of the social conservatives. They don’t like women;they don’t think that women should have the same rights as men, particularly if those women are women of color.
The prosecutors bringing these cases should have to walk a lot of miles in the shoes of the women they are persecuting…
TYPO ALERT:
I think you meant to write “for week who seek out an abortion”. (Not “see” out.)
Otherwise, good post.
Never heard about this, so thanks Bill.
It’s sickening on so many levels . . .
When will the masses decide, enuf is enuf?
“She was 15 when she became pregnant. The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at 36 weeks. It was when the prosecutors found that she had a cocaine habit they decided that they would charge a minor who lost a baby and had a problem with drugs with murder, more than that, they charged this child with what is called there a “depraved heart murder”. This type of murder is basically saying that someone died because the perpetrator had a depraved indifference to human life. Oh, and it carries a mandatory life sentence.”
Blatant misuse of a law. I tried filing a petition once for Neglect odf a child due to a mothers drug use and the court dismissed the petition.
Why does it always seem that some one always takes a well-meaning law that protects the life of an unborn fetus of someone who has been murdered while preganant and try and make it something it is not.
Almost 1/2 of all preganancies in the US are “spontaneous abortions”. Can’t wait until they start charging God!
It’s this kind of uterine police state that makes even my Republican mom take a stand, such as it is…
.
…she’ll mutter, “I don’t think the government has the right to tell a woman what to do with her body,” and then she’ll vote straight Repug…
Government is now small enough to fit inside a woman’s uterus.
Who’d have thought that could happen?
Fair-definition according to me: A place where pigs compete for blue ribbons.
Otherwise the word has no signifcant relevance to the affairs of mankind.
So we get a Mom who claims roundup or another pesticide killed her baby and then we demand that the chemical companies get tried for murder. Illegal immigrants who work on farms have a huge number of miscarriages we can get a class action suit going.
Roundup was certainly aware of what was happening the EU knew and that means roundup knew.
If you want to stop a GOP law that infringes on personal freedom apply the principle behind the law to big business…the GOP will leave skid marks as they scream government regulation is stopping innovation and jobs. F the Unborn its Cash we worship.
Sick Bastards……………