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Is Locking Up Pregnant Women the New Cure for State Financial Woes and Mental Health Problems?

by Lynn Paltrow, National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW)

March 30, 2011 - 4:05pm

In December of 2010, Bei Bei Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman living in Indiana, attempted to end her own life. She did so in one of the slowest and most painful ways possible: she consumed rat poison. With help from friends who intervened, however, she made it to a hospital and survived. The premature newborn she delivered by undergoing cesarean surgery did not. An Indiana prosecutor’s response has been to charge her with the crimes of murder (defined to include viable fetuses) and feticide (defined to include ending a human pregnancy at any stage). She has been arrested, denied bail, and will, unless bail is granted, be imprisoned for as long as her case proceeds through the court system.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), .. http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/ .. through Indiana-based counsel Kathrine Jack, is working with Indiana defense attorney Linda Pence to secure Ms. Shuai’s freedom and to defend the basic idea that when the person suffering from mental illness, severe depression, or any other health problem happens to be a pregnant woman, she does not lose her right to be treated like other human beings experiencing the same problems.

Pregnant women are not immune from the mental illness or severe depression that leads some people to attempt to end their lives. Indiana, like virtually every other state in the country, addresses suicide and attempted suicide as a public health issue, not a crime. Prosecutors simply may not decide that a suicide attempt is a public health issue for everyone except pregnant women. Moreover, there is wide consensus that subjecting pregnant women to special criminal penalties does not work. Rather, it undermines legitimate interests in maternal, fetal, and child health by stigmatizing pregnant women and by making them vulnerable to punishment if they seek help of any kind.

If this prosecution is allowed to go forward, the law will not just apply to one desperate pregnant woman who attempted suicide by swallowing rat poison – it will create legal precedent that makes every woman criminally liable for the outcome of her pregnancy. This precedent would mean that women who undergo significant risks to their lives and health by bringing forth life, sometimes undergoing major surgery to do so, may then be arrested as criminals if they are unable to guarantee the birth of a live and healthy baby. In addition, if Ms. Shuai’s prosecution is upheld, it leaves no doubt that women who intentionally end their pregnancies will go to jail as murderers if Roe is ever overturned.

This story and the heart-rending video .. http://www.theindychannel.com/news/27215238/detail.html .. that accompanies it, Attorney Rips Prosecutor In Infant Rat Poison Death, Pence: Prosecuting Pregnant Women 'Bad For Babies', provides a glimpse of the jailhouse dehumanization that awaits pregnant women who become the targets of state feticide and murder laws that have defined eggs, embryos, and fetuses as legally separate from pregnant women.

Women in Alabama may also look forward to such dehumanization. There, legislators suggest that locking up pregnant women, depriving them of treatment and separating them from their families is the right way to address drug dependency problems.

Alabama House Bill 8 .. http://e-lobbyist.com/gaits/AL/HB8 .. would amend the state’s chemical endangerment law, which was originally designed to deter people who run methamphetamine laboratories from bringing children to such dangerous locations. HB 8 would define the word “child” to include “an unborn child in utero at any stage of development,” and make the law applicable to a pregnant woman who uses any amount of a “controlled substance,” prescribed or otherwise, at any point in her pregnancy, and whether or not she knew she was pregnant at the time.

In other words, the bill would allow prosecutors to treat a pregnant woman as if she herself is an illegal drug lab.

Alabama, like most states, makes it a crime to possess illegal drugs, not to use or be addicted to them. This is consistent with state and federal efforts to encourage people to seek help for drug problems. HB 8, however, creates a gender-based law that singles out pregnant women for criminal punishment.

To be clear, HB 8 will not increase pregnant women’s access to treatment or care. Instead, it will increase the number of pregnant women and new mothers in Alabama’s notoriously horrific jails and prisons. And wait there is more! According to the fiscal impact statement that accompanies the bill: This bill could increase receipts to the State General Fund from fines, increase receipts to the State General Fund, county general funds and other funds to which court costs are deposited. In other words, because pregnant women arrested under this law will be required to pay fines, court fees and other costs, Alabama claims locking up pregnant women and new mothers will be a money-making proposition for the state.

The prosecution in Indiana and the proposed law in Alabama both fly in the face of medical and public health recommendations regarding the most effective and appropriate ways to respond to suicide attempts and drug-dependency disorders. That these states believe there is value, financial or otherwise, in locking up pregnant women with these problems is stark evidence of how little, in fact, they value pregnant women and the children they purport to be protecting.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2011/03/30/locking-pregnant-women-cure-state-financial-woes-mental-health-problems

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Stillbirth mum up for murder
June 26, 2011

If a woman takes a drug and her unborn baby dies, is she a killer?
That's a question now before courts in the US, writes Ed Pilkington.

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit - though there is no evidence that drug abuse contributed to the baby's death - they charged her with the ''depraved-heart murder'' of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby but her case is not an isolated one. Across the US prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.
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''Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws,'' Lynn Paltrow, of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said.

''It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights.''

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in prison in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On December 23 she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai survived, but she was 33 weeks' pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March, Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

In Alabama, at least 40 cases have been brought under the state's ''chemical endangerment'' law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes.

Amanda Kimbrough has been ensnared by the law in a different way. During her pregnancy her foetus was diagnosed with possible Down syndrome and doctors suggested she consider a termination. Kimbrough declined because she opposes abortion.

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and lived just 19 minutes.

Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with ''chemical endangerment'' of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy - a claim she has denied.

''That shocked me, it really did,'' Kimbrough said. ''I had lost a child; that was enough.''

She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which, if she loses, will see her begin a 10-year jail sentence. ''I'm just living one day at a time, looking after my three other kids,'' she said. ''They say I'm a criminal - how do

I answer that? I'm a good mother.''

Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion, in which conservative prosecutors are chipping away at hard-won freedoms by stretching protection laws to include foetuses, in some cases from the day of conception. In Gibbs's case defence lawyers have argued before Mississippi's highest court that her prosecution makes no sense. Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.

''If it's not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is,'' Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer asked the state supreme court.

McDuff said he hoped the Gibbs prosecution was an isolated example. ''I hope it's not a trend that's going to catch on,'' he said. ''To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme.''

Guardian News & Media .. http://www.smh.com.au/world/stillbirth-mum-up-for-murder-20110625-1gkhl.html

See also:

GO GOP GO

The wave of “tea party” republicans who swept to massive wins all over the country in the last election is
“coming home to roost” (for lack of a better term). We see it up close and personal in Wisconsin with Scott
Walkers war on labor and education, now it is popping up all over the country like a very bad case of acne.

Here are two galling examples of republican “compassionate conservatism”:
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Alabama Passes "Fetal Pain" Anti-Abortion Bill, Rejects Exceptions For Rape And Incest
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