The illegality of a miscarriage..

I have to admit, when I read this, I thought it was a joke. Because really, it can't be anything but a joke. Sadly, it was not a joke.

A school custodian, in Texas, apparently came across what looked like a miscarriage in one of the girl's toilets at a Texas school. The principal was notified that one of its students may have miscarried in one of the girl's toilets. Under normal circumstances, or in a normal part of reality, the teachers would look at their students, try to figure out who it was and who may be in need of help. You know, provide support and possible medical assistance to someone who is clearly in need of it (miscarriage can sometimes require a D&C as anything remaining inside the uterus can become infected, which can be catastrophic for the mother).. Instead, the police were called.

Yes, that's right, the police were called.

The result was a swarm of police officers rushing to the school to look for a "suspect" and to determine if she had miscarried or had an abortion and to pray for the foetus. Worried and terrified parents arrived at the school to find police swarming around the school and a police helicopter buzzing over-head.

So if you imagine, a terrified teenage girl miscarried her pregnancy and this is the response. She is automatically a suspect.

Parents in Texas are upset after police reportedly “swarmed” a Texas high school because a girl may have had a miscarriage in one of the bathrooms.

KDFW reported that a school custodian notified the principal at Woodrow Wilson High School after finding a “possible fetus” in one of the bathroom stalls on Friday.

The principal contacted police, who “swarmed” the school, according to KTVT.

[HR][/HR]

Dallas Police Department’s Child Abuse Unit detectives were investigating to find out who may have abandoned the fetus. The person involved was being considered a “suspect.”

“We’re reviewing video, talking to the teachers, trying to determine if anybody has any knowledge of any student that may have had something going on in their life, and pray,” Dallas Police Major John Lawton said.

Alan Elliott of Baby Moses Dallas explained to KDFW that the mother could have avoided any criminal charges if she had taken advantage of Baby Moses laws by carrying the child to term, and then dropping it off at a safe baby site like a fire station.

“And that’s a happy ending when that happens, because the baby is safe, the mother is protected from any sort of prosecution, so it’s a win-win for both of them,” Elliot noted.
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Except for when the poor girl naturally miscarries into a toilet. It's not abandonment of a foetus. It's called a miscarriage. Women suffer through them all the time. When I was pregnant with my first child, I started to feel unwell in the 38th week of my pregnancy and as a precaution, I was hospitalised to monitor my blood pressure that had risen slightly, just to make sure. While there, I had a double room and a woman who was 27 weeks pregnant had presented with signs of premature labour. She was given an ulrasound and she and I were sharing this room. Lovely woman who was clearly unwell. At one point she got up to go to the bathroom in our room and I heard her moaning. I got out of my bed and walked to the bathroom door to ask her if she was alright as there was clearly something wrong as I heard her start to cry. I pressed the emergency buzzer and opened the bathroom door as a midwife came belting down the corridor to find her on all fours in front of the toilet and her child's legs sticking up partially out of the toilet bowl with blood everywhere. She had delivered in the toilet and was on the floor, in shock. As the midwife pushed past me and grabbed the baby out of the toilet and checked if it was breathing, she asked me to press the code button and to hold the poor woman as the rest of the medical staff flooded into the bathroom. It was a horrific experience and sadly, apparently not that uncommon. Here in Australia, there was no suspicion of how she delivered so early or miscarried, no police were called.. Had it happened somewhere that was not a hospital, she would not be classified as a suspect. The child, a little girl, only lived for 3 days. It was, essentially, a miscarriage and treated as such (obviously with a lot more care considering the circumstances). But women miscarry in bathrooms all the time. It is not a crime.

This case in Texas was apparently clearly a miscarriage and they have stopped their criminal investigation. Well gee, thanks for that. Good to know! It's great to know that miscarriages are now to be subjected to criminal investigations.

Yes, I know, it's Texas, where access to abortion is virtually nil and the mere thought of ending a pregnancy has become illegal. I get it, it's in a country where even saying out loud that you want an abortion can lead to imprisonment (yes, this actually happened to a woman in Iowa). But when it has gotten to the point where police helicopter buzzes overhead to search for a "suspect" who was unfortunate enough to miscarry while at school... Something is very very wrong with this scenario.

With increasing regularity, women who are unfortunate enough to miscarry or not deliver a live baby are being placed under a criminal microscope. Women who may not be happy at the prospect of being pregnant or at the thought of having a child, if they miscarry or deliver a still birth, are being prosecuted. One woman who attempted to abort her baby by taking abortion pills is being prosecuted for two completely different and conflicting things. One for foetal murder and another for child neglect. One requires the foetus to die inside her uterus and the other is if she delivered a live child and abandoned it. So the charges are completely conflicted but they do cover any and all bases, just in case.

Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, the ethics behind the Constitutional legality of those charges are very disturbing. Because they do not know whether the foetus died inutero or after she delivered it prematurely. So they are charging her with two conflicting charges to make sure that either way, she will go to jail. As Sally Kohn of the Daily Beast noted:

Upon examination of the fetus by police and medical staff, prosecutors initially charged Patel with felony neglect, a class A felony in Indiana that carries a 20- to 50-year prison sentence. And yet under Indiana law, Patel could only be convicted of neglecting her dependent child if prosecutors could prove she gave birth to a live baby.

So, to cover their bases, prosecutors also charged Patel with feticide, a class B felony. According to court records, Patel said in text messages found on her phone that she had taken drugs to try to terminate her pregnancy—although according to the ER doctor’s affidavit, one of the two drugs Patel took would not have had any effect. Nonetheless, Patel can be found guilty of feticide if she “knowingly or intentionally” terminated her pregnancy “with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus.” Feticide carries an 8- to 20-year prison sentence under Indiana law.

The legal knot here is dumbfounding. The State of Indiana intends to convict and incarcerate Purvi Patel one way or another, whether the fetus she delivered was alive or not—never mind the fact that the facts necessary for filing the one charge (that the fetus have been alive) entirely contradict the facts necessary for filing the other (that the fetus have been dead) and vice versa. But the utter illogic of the legal prosecution simply echoes the illogic of Indiana’s law and others like them—which not only unconscionably (and arguably unconstitutionally) restrict a woman’s right to abortion but tread dangerously close to criminalizing pregnancy as a whole.

If you do your job as a woman and give perfect birth to a perfect baby, you’re safe. But God forbid anything go wrong, that you have any complications either due to your own actions or actions that could be attributed to you, that you as a woman fail in your duty as a vessel for the fetus—the rights of which the State of Indiana is clearly more invested in than your own. What then?
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What then indeed. In Texas, a miscarriage will result in police officers, a police helicopter, all searching for a "suspect".

In Iowa, the mere mention of an abortion to a nurse will result in being arrested, because her falling down the stairs in an accident was deemed her trying to terminate her pregnancy. The reality was that she was stressed about the fall and at the prospect of having a child with an estranged husband. Something she had discussed with the nurse prior to her fall, when she had said that she was not sure if she would continue with her pregnancy or put it up for adoption as she faced the prospect of raising another child on her own, but that she had opted to keep the child and raise it herself.. The terrifying thing about this case is that nurses often ask pregnant women probing questions about how you are mentally, etc, how you are coping, about your home life. Women are supposed to be able to trust them enough to open up to them and talk through it.. Now in the US, I'd probably caution against it.

So to women in the US, keep this in mind if you are of child bearing age:

At the end of the day, anti-choicers aren’t just trying to end access to legal abortion. They’re pushing a model of what they think womanhood should be: chaste, highly feminine, submissive, and oriented towards motherhood. That means any woman who fails to meet those ideals by being less than stoked about a pregnancy or by reacting to pregnancy loss in ways that they don’t approve of is in very real danger of falling under suspicion. And now that the cops are getting called on someone for miscarrying in a bathroom, we’ve gotten one step closer to the anti-choice dystopia.​

If you are ever unfortunate enough to miscarry or deliver prematurely, best make sure you bawl and scream over that miscarriage and make sure you look pious and chaste. Otherwise you could find yourself being charged with numerous and conflicting charges to make sure you pay if you don't fit into that particular 'model' of womanhood.

 

I would imagine that the thought processes from the first dickwad who thought it would be a good idea to investigate women for miscarrying has the element of sadism and insanity.

When it gets to the point where you can be prosecuted with conflicting charges (each apply to wholly different crimes that cannot and should not theoretically be applied at the same time for the physical impossibility of both applying at the same time), then really, it's dangerous territory. In every sense of the word.

But sending police cars and police swarming a school with a police helicopter hovering overhead looking for a suspect in a miscarriage in a bathroom? It defies any sense of logic.

 

An unknown situation? A cleaner found the remains of a miscarriage in a bathroom and they swarmed the school with a police helicopter overhead looking for a "suspect".. In other words, they had pre-determined that she had committed the crime of murdering the baby they openly said they were praying for. No, really, we all want armed police officers scaring the crap out of parents, teachers and children alike, because they think a woman miscarrying is suspected of murder. That's now how you get the girl help. If I was that girl, I'd not speak up out of fear that I was being accused of murdering my child (which is essentially what they did as they got there).

It's obscene. A quiet investigation into who had potentially miscarried does not amount to police helicopters hovering overhead and dozens of officers swarming over the school. One is what you would expect for an active shooter. Not a miscarriage.

And frankly, the media do need to report on such things because such things are not only stupid, they are also blatantly dangerous because you have the legal system and the State turning pregnant women into crime scenes if they are unfortunate enough to miscarry or have or even talk about a legal abortion.

 

They encountered what they thought was a foetus. They weren't sure.

It hardly required the response it received.

Why would you need a police helicopter and a swarm of officers converging on the school to do so?

Why would she? Are women supposed to hand themselves in to police if they miscarry in Texas?

No. Miscarriage is not illegal.

Do police go and pray over the remains of miscarriages?

I would say the media hype followed the obscene reaction by the police who treated it like it was a crime scene and acted as if someone had murdered their baby.

The report clearly noted, that the custodian had reported that he thought he had seen a foetus in one of the bathrooms. Hardly an "unknown situation".

It wasn't an unknown situation. They knew that there was a possible dead foetus in one of the bathrooms in what looked like a possible miscarriage. The custodian reported it to the principal. It hardly warranted a police helicopters and dozens of police officers and virtually locking down the school, barring parents from entering or people from leaving. The response was overblown and frankly, obscene. Treating a girl who had miscarried as though she was a criminal, referring to her as a suspect for a natural process she had no control over is frankly, idiotic, and would have caused her undue stress after what would clearly have been a stressful and terrifying situation and scaring the 1500 or so other students and their parents and the staff even more.

 

Why?

An ambulance should have been the only reaction and possibly a police officer or two, to try to find the missing girl to make sure she was okay and take her to a hospital to make sure she had expelled all of it and to make sure she didn't need a D&C. That should have been the extent of it. Not dozens of police officers, media called, helicopters, etc.. I mean really.

It's the criminalisation of pregnancy that should be the biggest concern here. The thought that a girl who miscarries is treated as a suspect. It's ridiculous.