Georgia woman facing murder change due to 'feticide' law

[GirlSailor]

Story here:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/10/georgia-woman-murder-charge-fetus

23 year old bought pills online (which are only half of the drugs used in medical abortions) as no abortion clinic was available to her nearby. Police were called after she went to the hospital in the process of delivering the foetus, which later died. It says she was 5.5 months, so 22 weeks, which is the legal limit for abortions in Georgia. However, courts have blocked that law as far as I can see.

Even more worrying is the North Dakota law set to come into force in August, banning abortions after 6 weeks.

[BigChocFrenzy]

Very depressing how the right wing worshippers of the sky fairy (and the dollar) have taken over large chunks of the US.

They are pro-life, but only up until birth.

After that, it's Social Darwinism.
A desperate situation for low-income women. And as always in the US, the poor face long jail sentences for any suspected infraction.

I read that some women in liberal parts of the US have set up charities to help, e.g. funding travel and medical care. However, there are far too few resources for the number of women needing help.

[DoughDoe]

The charges were dismissed the same day www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/10/georgia-woman-abortion-pill-murder-charge-dismissed

[SingingSands]

Glad the charges were dismissed. Read something recently about how many laws in the US there are over a woman's body - something like over 200? Sickening.

[NiceViper]

That would be a crime in UK as well.

Because abortion is legal here only within the Act, and that requires doctors involvement.

And the penalty does go up to life imprisonment, even though the word 'murder' is not used.

[NiceViper]

Is the number of prosecutions relevant though?

After all, not all crimes are reported, and not all reports of a crime lead to prosecution, and not all prosecutions lead to conviction. But that doesn't mean something isn't an offence.

Deploring US States for having laws that are the essentially the same as the law in E/W always seems odd to me.

[TheVermiciousKnid]

The difference in the UK would have been that this woman would have had much easier access to an abortion and therefore would have been unlikely to do what she did.

[PuffinsAreFictitious]

This is not only targeting women however.

Most of the women who have been arrested for child destruction have been poor and black. Are we to conclude from this that poor white women just shrug their shoulders and get on with the dangerous business of birthing children they don't want? Or can we fairly safely assume that there night be some institutional racism at play here?

[WhirlpoolGalaxyM51]

If this is the same case as the one on a thread recently, many posters IIRC said it was right that she be prosecuted.

FWIW laws around inducing abortions / feticide / etc are generally enacted to prosecute external parties who attempt to induce abortion / kill feotuses against the will of the woman carrying it , AFAIK. So the use of these laws in the US for prosecuting desperate women trying to procure abortions when they do not have the means / access otherwise AKA backstreet / illegal abortions is concerning. Most of these laws were written to prosecute people who eg administer abortion drugs or poisons to women without consent or try to induce abortion through violence, or who kill a feotus as part of a violent attack on a woman. The difference between suicide and murder I guess is the closest analogy you can get.

Of course in plenty of countries abortion is illegal and women access illegal abortions and die / are incarcerated because of it. There is a country in south america where a large number of women are in prison seemingly because they miscarried, so that's the next step (mooted in the US in various states and situations already - one woman has already been imprisoned because in a failed attempt to kill herself, she killed the foetus she was carrying).

[WhirlpoolGalaxyM51]

Puffins and yes of course one law for the rich / one for the poor / racism and so forth weigh into this hugely as well.

[MagicalHamSandwich]

Actually, Viper, I do think the number of prosecutions matters. There's a big difference between something being technically illegal but largely tolerated and it being actively repressed.

IME the former often seems to be the case where the law lags behind social attitudes. E.g. I've been working in Switzerland for going on three years now. Apparently they have a blasphemy law here. I only found out last week after a co-worker jokingly threatened to report me. If this was taken seriously I'd arguably be incarcerated for life!

So if a woman wouldn't be facing the same treatment in the UK despite a roughly comparable legal basis this does suggest that British attitudes may have shifted ahead of the law. As others have pointed out the US appears to have a very different mindset in this respect.