Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages
Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages
On March 14, 2009, 31 weeks into her pregnancy, Nina Buckhalter gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. She named the child Hayley Jade. Two months later, a grand jury in Lamar County, Mississippi, indicted Buckhalter for manslaughter, claiming that the then-29-year-old woman "did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, kill Hayley Jade Buckhalter, a human being, by culpable negligence."
The district attorney argued that methamphetamine detected in Buckhalter's system caused Hayley Jade's death. The state Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the case on April 2, is expected to rule soon on whether the prosecution can move forward.
If prosecutors prevail in this case, the state would be setting a "dangerous precedent" that "unintentional pregnancy loss can be treated as a form of homicide," says Farah Diaz-Tello, a staff attorney with National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a nonprofit legal organization that has joined with Robert McDuff, a Mississippi civil rights lawyer, to defend Buckhalter. If Buckhalter's case goes forward, NAPW fears it could spur a wave of similar prosecutions in Mississippi and other states.
Mississippi's manslaughter laws were not intended to apply in cases of stillbirths and miscarriages. Four times between 1998 through 2002, Mississippi lawmakers rejected proposals that would have set specific penalties for damaging a fetus by using illegal drugs during pregnancy. But Mississippi prosecutors say that two other state laws allow them to charge Buckhalter. One defines of manslaughter as the "killing of a human being, by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another"; another includes "an unborn child at every stage of gestation from conception until live birth" in the state's definition of human beings.
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Full article here: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/buckhalter-mississippi-stillbirth-manslaughter
SummerSnow
(12,608 posts)niyad
(112,432 posts)CLEARLY far more important than the woman.)
I wonder when enough women are going to wake up and realize that these laws are not jokes, the are intended to give us "the handmaid's tale" as our reality.
Each of us needs to bombard the woman-hating legislators with this simple question:
WHY do you hate women?
Megalo_Man
(88 posts)Willingly using drugs that result in the death of your baby should be a punishable crime IMO.
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)You KNOW they want to go there. Just got to find a way to sell it to the ignoramuses.
NYtoBush-Drop Dead
(490 posts)REpugs will continue to fail as long as they treat women as incubators for the next generation of canon-fodder.
Crunchy Frog
(26,548 posts)when their medical malfeasance results in a stillbirth?
If they're going to target, they should do it equally. I doubt the medical lobbies would allow it to come to that, though.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)What color most of the women will be.
faye
(39 posts)It sounds like we are just a few small steps away from the 1990 film.
marmar
(76,982 posts)........ apparently they love it.