In a growing number of US states, pregnant women who miscarry their babies are being criminalized, some charged with murder. Ultimately, the move by state prosecutors is more widely aimed at stripping women of the legal right to abortion sanctioned by the US Supreme Court in its 1971 ruling in Roe v. Wade.
In 2006 in Mississippi, Rennie Gibbs, who became pregnant at the age of 15, lost her baby in a stillbirth at 36 weeks into the pregnancy. Prosecutors charged her with the depraved-heart murder of her child after they discovered she had abused cocaine, although there was no evidence that the babys death was connected to the mothers substance abuse. The murder charge carries a mandatory life sentence.
Some 70 organizations across the US have filed amicus briefs in support of Ms. Gibbs in this ongoing case. In particular, they take aim at the claims by anti-abortion forces that such prosecutions protect mothers and their unborn children. One of the briefs says that to treat as a murderer a girl who has experienced a stillbirth serves only to increase her suffering.
Another woman, Bei Bei Shuai, has been imprisoned for the last three months without bail in Indianapolis, Indiana, charged with murdering her baby. According to police records, the 34-year-old woman attempted suicide last December 23 by ingesting rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her when she was 33 weeks pregnant.
Shuai was rushed to the hospital and survived, giving birth to her baby the next week. The baby died four days later, and in March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted feticide. Alabama has prosecuted at least 40 cases brought under the states chemical endangerment law, which was introduced in 2006. The law, purportedly designed to protect children from fumes inhaled from methamphetamine being cooked by their parents, is now being used to criminalize pregnant women who miscarry.
Alabama mother Amanda Kimbrough delivered her baby prematurely in April 2008, and the baby died 19 minutes after birth. Kimbrough learned during her pregnancy that her child possibly suffered from Downs syndrome, but she chose to carry the child to term. Six months after the birth, she was arrested and charged with chemical endangerment of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs while pregnant. She denies the claim.
This is Ron Paul's America.