COMMENTARY: "Making abortion a criminal offence is exactly what everyone feared - and as Kenlissia Jones and Purvi Patel know, it's already happening," by Lauren Barbato, published by Bustle on June 10, 2015. (Bustle is an online women's magazine founded in by Bryan Goldberg. It surpassed 10 million monthly unique visitors in July 2014. (Wikipedia));
GIST: Earlier this year, Purvi Patel left a courthouse in handcuffs. The Indiana woman accused of both feticide and child neglect was staring down a 20-year sentence for taking miscarriage-inducing pills purchased online — an allegation that was not entirely proven during her trial — and terminating a late-term pregnancy that resulted in a stillbirth. But whether or not Patel actually took those pills doesn’t matter at this point; the judge and jury believed a woman self-terminating a pregnancy was a punishable offense. Patel became the first American woman convicted of ending a pregnancy with abortion pills, and she won’t be the last. This week, it looked as though Kenlissia Jones faced a bleaker fate than Patel: The 23-year-old from Albany, Georgia, was charged this week with malice murder and possession of dangerous drugs after she arrived at a local hospital having just given birth, although the murder charge was dropped Wednesday. Jones reportedly went into labor as a neighbor drove her to the emergency room, not long after she took four Cytotec pills, WALB TV reported. (Cytotec is a brand of misoprostol, one of the two most-common drugs prescribed by doctors to terminate pregnancies.) If her murder charge had not been dropped, Jones could have faced the death penalty — the death penalty for ending a pregnancy in not the safest or most sterile manner, but not an entirely illegal one, either. Abortion opponents and other critics may have thought reproductive health advocates were overreacting to Patel’s sentence last April, but the reaction now seems more than just. The criminalization of women who have abortions is happening in America, and it’s what advocates have feared as abortion laws become more oppressive across large swaths of the United States.........Paltrow added that Jones’ arrest confirms the newly energized anti-abortion movement is now leveraging its power over unexpected pregnancy loss and desperate self-termination. But unlike nations where abortion is completely outlawed — such as Chile and El Salvador, where women are imprisoned for years for either self-terminating or seeking an illegal abortion — the anti-abortion contingent here in America has never advocated for throwing women in prison. “We call on leading anti-abortion organizations, who have publicly and repeatedly said that they oppose punishing women for having abortions, to stand with Kenlissia Jones,” Paltrow said. “People who seek medical attention for any aspect of pregnancy … should not fear arrest.”.........Many women in America now find themselves ensnared in a sticky legal bind that can be, quite literally, a manner of life or death: If a woman can’t afford to have a legal medication-induced abortion in a clinic, but uses the same or similar drugs at home, they may be charged and prosecuted. And if a woman needs medical attention following the self-termination, it appears it’s all but certain there will be consequences."
The entire commentary can be found at:
http://www.bustle.com/articles/89298-making-abortion-a-criminal-offense-is-exactly-what-everyone-feared-and-as-kenlissia-jones
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
