GIST: "Back in October 2021, a woman was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina due to labour contractions. Once there, she told medical professionals that she had taken an abortion pill to terminate her pregnancy. She later gave birth to a stillborn foetus of 25 weeks and four days.
The 33-year-old woman was arrested this week under the state’s law that bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and prohibits abortions without the presence of a physician or a certified hospital member set up during the second trimester.
Greenville Police Department Spokesperson Johnathan Bragg revealed that it was the hospital that notified the police about the incident—a clear warning of the country’s crackdown on women’s rights following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The floodgates on new punishments have officially been opened.
But this heartbreaking story is only the most recent one out of numerous cases around the country, most of which have not received any kind of media attention for obvious reasons.
In April 2022, Texan woman Lizelle Herrera was charged with murder for allegedly inducing her abortion, despite the fact that prosecutors acknowledged that there was no legal basis for the charges at the time.
It was later on revealed that medical professionals treating Herrera at one of the state’s hospitals had reported her to law enforcement. The Starr County Sheriff’s Office charged her with murder for “intentionally and knowingly causing the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”
The local district attorney eventually dropped the case against Herrera, only three months before the vote to overturn abortion rights in the country. Then, in August, a Nebraska woman was charged with helping her teenage daughter terminate her pregnancy at about 24 weeks after investigators uncovered Facebook messages in which the two discussed using medication to induce an abortion, as well as plans to burn the foetus afterwards.
In other words, they felt the need to burn the ‘evidence’.
Following the controversial case making headlines, Facebook said it will fight back against requests that it thinks are invalid or too broad, but went on to add that it gave investigators information in about 88 per cent of the 59,996 times when the government requested data in the second half of 2021.
The end of Roe will only further increase policing authority over pregnant people’s lives and expand the US’ prison industrial complex. And it comes as the incarceration of women is already on the rise.
According to The Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy centre working for decarceration in the country, the number of women behind bars increased by more than 475 per cent between 1980 and 2020.
In prison, women face an increased chance of sexual and physical violence, as well as demeaning conditions, including the continued practice of shackling pregnant women during child birth and offering limited access to hygiene products.
Now that abortion is actually a crime in many states, it’s likely that jailing people for their pregnancy outcomes could go from an unusual event to a common occurrence.
And, with institutions—both physical and online—actively filtering out abortion cases and flagging vulnerable pregnant people to the authorities, it’s feeling as though the US has officially begun a wide-scale witch-hunt."
The entire story can be read at:
https://screenshot-media.com/politics/human-rights/abortion-witch-hunt-begins/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
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