If Roe falls, more women will be prosecuted for miscarriages
By Radley Balko
About 10 years ago, a longtime state medical examiner in Texas and Mississippi told me something that has stuck with me ever since. He said there’s a type of prosecutor who believes that innocent babies just don’t die on their own. “They don’t believe in accidents,” he said, “especially when the parents are poor. Someone must be at fault. So someone has to pay.”
It isn’t hard to find cases to back up his theory. I’ve previously written about Hattie Douglas, a Mississippi woman who was arrested and jailed for a year for killing her infant son with alcohol poisoning until a lab concluded a medical examiner had botched the test results. There’s Sabrina Butler, who spent two years on death row for murdering her infant son, until doctors later concluded the baby likely died of kidney disease. Jeffrey Havard is still serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend’s 6-month-old, despite multiple affidavits from medical professionals concluding the forensic evidence against him was junk science. In 2012, a Georgia woman was convicted of vehicular homicide after her 4-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver, because she and her son were jaywalking at the time.
Other medical examiners and defense attorneys have since echoed the sentiment, pointing to cases in which prosecutors utilized scientifically dubious expert testimony to secure convictions after a baby has died. Many point to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that swept through the criminal legal system in the 1990s. The diagnosis has since come under fire in the scientific community, but it’s still given weight in much of the country, including Mississippi, where just last year the state’s Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold a conviction based on the theory.
It’s against this history that criminal defense and civil rights groups have expressed alarm over Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. If some prosecutors already believe babies don’t die without criminal culpability, it stands to reason that as state legislatures push fetal personhood back to fertilization, the same logic will be applied to miscarriages. Women who miscarry could be investigated for using alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs, or engaging in other behavior prosecutors deem risky.
In fact, this is already happening. In 2007, a Lowndes County, Miss. grand jury indicted Rennie Gibbs with murder after a stillbirth when traces of a cocaine byproduct were found in her blood. In 2020, an Oklahoma woman was charged after methamphetamine was found in her system (despite a medical examiner’s conclusion that it played no role in the miscarriage). In 2019, an Alabama woman was charged with manslaughter for starting an argument with another woman, who then shot her, killing her fetus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/if-roe-falls-more-women-will-be-prosecuted-miscarriages/?itid=hp_opinions
And we won't even talk about the doctors that will be prosecuted for cleaning up after a miscarriage....
= new reply since forum marked as read
