Guardian UK: Outcry in America as pregnant women who lose babies face murder charges

[marmar]

Outcry in America as pregnant women who lose babies face murder charges
Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 June 2011


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 had anything to do with 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 by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights." ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges

[intaglio]

1. k&r n/t

[avebury]

2. Conservatives have flat out lost their minds.

[indepat]

3. And those who keep putting/re-electing them to public office: surely tantamount to a national

psychosis running amok? :patriot:

[Kurovski]

4. It's what psychotics do. Create bizarre, sadistic situations, then force people into them.