Analysis

Dear Jezebel: fetal homicide laws exist to protect unborn babies

Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan got a few things wrong in her recent post, “When Laws Designed to Protect Pregnant Women End Up Imprisoning Them.” But that’s no surprise. Jezebel has missed the mark on more than one occasion. This time, the entire post is based on the inaccurate claim that fetal homicide laws were established to protect pregnant women. But these laws were put in place to protect unborn babies from harm and to allow prosecutors to charge anyone – except abortionists – who kills an unborn child with anything from battery to homicide. In some states, that includes the mother herself.

Pregnant Woman Attempts Suicide

When Bei Bei Shuai ingested rat poison at 33 weeks’ gestation and her baby girl did not survive, she was charged with fetal homicide. It didn’t matter to police that she was attempting suicide because her boyfriend had left her. Her actions led to the death of another human being, whether she mourned the loss of her child or not. It isn’t the first time a distraught mother has caused the death of her innocent child. Does Shuai deserve to receive mental health care based on her actions? Yes. But her daughter, named Angel, was old enough to be born healthy, and she deserved her life. Instead, she suffered a brain hemorrhage and died at just 4 days old because her mother poisoned her. It’s a heartbreaking situation. But the main reason Jezebel would have a problem with Shuai being arrested is because Jezebel fears that cases like this, and fetal homicide laws themselves, will help end legal abortion.

False Reports of a Push down the Stairs

Ryan also mentions Christine Taylor in the post, and she gets the details wrong. Ryan claims that Taylor, pregnant with her third child, was pushed down the stairs by her abusive husband, and then Taylor herself was charged with fetal homicide. That would be an appalling reason for a lawyer to charge a grieving, abused mother with murder (and I bet Ryan was betting on all of her readers becoming outraged at this). But according to a variety of reports, that’s not what happened. Taylor, according to Radio Iowa, went to the hospital, where she told the doctors that after a phone call from her estranged husband, she was distraught and distracted, causing her to trip and fall down the stairs. She said she came to the hospital to make sure her baby was okay, which the baby is. Based on the information given to the doctors, police arrested Taylor for attempted fetal homicide. However, the charges were dropped when Taylor’s actual doctor told police that she was not yet in her third trimester, since Iowa fetal homicide laws protect unborn children from their parents only after 28 weeks’ gestation.

Was Taylor attempting to kill her unborn child, or did she really trip and fall? Her visit to the ER implies that it was an accident, but only she knows for sure. Either way, Taylor isn’t being charged, and her baby is safe, and that’s what matters most. Readers were likely distressed by Jezebel’s false reports of the husband causing the fall and police placing the blame on the victim. In reality, police were following up as they are required to do, and while it’s unclear whether police went too far, both mother and baby are alive and well.

Homicide laws are in place to protect all of us, including pregnant women, from being murdered. But since unborn children have lost their right to life, and the value of their lives has therefore been diminished, fetal homicide laws were put in place to protect “wanted” unborn children from being unjustly killed. These laws are an attempt to get justice for the babies and closure for grieving parents. What’s ludicrous is that value of an unborn baby’s life is based solely on her mother’s opinion of her. Imagine if whether we lived or died depended on what one person thought. While abortion tells us that unborn babies don’t matter, fetal homicide laws prove that they do.

   
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  • Guest

    Jezebel was indeed being (atypically) naive when it entertained the notion that proponents of fetal homicide laws have any interest in protecting pregnant women.

    When proponents of abortion rights argue that recriminalizing abortion will lead to prosecution of women who have abortions, pro-lifers claim that they are being disingenuous and that abortion opponents don’t want to put women in prison. Fetal homicide laws demonstrate that of course that’s what they want.

    • http://prolife-girl.blogspot.ca/ Anon

       Actually, what most pro-lifers argue against is the idea that all women whose pregnancies ends will get thrown in jail for life, no matter the circumstances (abortion, forced abortion, miscarriage, accident, etc). That doesn’t happen when people are accused of causing the death of a born person, so why would the police ignore circumstances when dealing with the death an unborn person?

      • Guest

        so why would the police ignore circumstances when dealing with the death an unborn person?

        I guess that’s a question you should direct towards the prosecutor who is charging a woman who attempted suicide while pregnant with a crime that carries a minimum sentence of 45 years in prison.  The obvious answer is that he thinks that women who bring about the end of their pregnancies should be thrown in jail for life. 

  • Oedipa

    Ms. Shuai’s case is, indeed, “heartbreaking”. But she’s not alone. There’s Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi, who was a 15-year old cocaine user, now facing a mandatory life sentence, after her baby was born stillborn at 36 weeks. Even though there’s no evidence that cocaine had anything to do with the baby’s death.

    Then there’s Amanda Kimbrough, a pro-life teenager from Alabama who was persuaded to abort when her fetus was diagnosed with Downs. She declined, had a caesarean, and the baby died 19 minutes later. Prosecutors now claim she did drugs during the pregnancy and she’s facing a 10-year sentence.

    In the Alabama case, Ms. Kimbrough is being prosecuted for “chemical endangerment”, a law that was initially designed to protect children from their parents or guardians that may be engaged in dangerous ad hoc meth labs. Despite your protestations that these laws are being executed as they were intended to be, Ms. Kimbrough’s case is an example of a rogue prosecutor twisting the law to punish the child bearer.

    South Carolina is another sad testing ground for these laws. Since passing it’s foetal homicide law, only one man has been prosecuted for assaulting a pregnant woman (it’s original intent), but up to 300 women have been arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

    And, yet, if you spend enough time in conservative circles, you hear that there’s really, really no “War on Women”.

    • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

      That’s right. There is no “War on Women.” It’s a malicious fiction concocted by vile demagogues to exploit the fears and prejudices of the ignorant, and parroted by unprincipled hacks who are incapable of defending their position with honor.

      Unless you’re prepared to make the case that there’s some sort of contingent of pro-life and/or conservative politicians & activists who for some reason *want* girls prosecuted for innocent miscarriages, your examples mean approximately zilch. Incompetent and overzealous prosecutors are a sad fact of the criminal justice system…not an ideological cause or policy goal.

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