Can You Get in Trouble for No Prenatal Care

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Ballgame continues to be a hot-push upshot in the US, as dozens of states have passed measures to limit women's access to the process. But even women who want to be pregnant are not complimentary of legal restraints on their bodies, as a new paper in the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Constabulary demonstrates. In many instances, women have been arrested, institutionalized, or subjected to unwanted medical interventions due to their pregnancies.

The paper looks at 413 criminal and civil cases from 1973 to 2005 in which women were subject field to legal action related to their unborn children. In all the cases, the women were deprived of their own civil liberties by legal authorities claiming to seek protection of the fetus. Many dealt with charges related to drug or alcohol apply during pregnancy, refusing to follow doctor'due south orders, or for miscarriages that were blamed on their actions (even if at that place was little to no evidence to prove that those deportment led to the miscarriage).

In a piece at RH Reality Check, the paper's authors detail some of the examples they found in their search of legal and public records, also every bit media accounts. Hither are simply a few of them they include:

• A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent approximately a year in jail before her counsel was able to show that what was deemed a murder of a fetus or newborn was actually a miscarriage that resulted from medication given to her past a wellness intendance provider.
• In Texas, a pregnant woman who sometimes smoked marijuana to ease nausea and boost her appetite gave birth to healthy twins. She was arrested for delivery of a controlled substance to a small.
• A physician in Wisconsin had concerns about a woman's plans to take her nascence attended by a midwife. As a result, a civil court order of protective custody for the woman's fetus was obtained. The gild authorized the sheriff's section to have the woman into custody, transport her to a hospital, and discipline her to involuntary testing and medical treatment.

Fifty-two percent of the women in the cases they found  were African American. Seventy-one pct were likely low income, equally they were represented by indigent defence force in the legal example. Sixty-9 per centum were under the age of 30, and 56 percent were in the South. And, lest you retrieve these are by and large sometime cases, they institute more than 25 in 2005, the concluding year included in the newspaper. The authors also said that, while not included in this research, they are aware of at to the lowest degree 250 cases since 2005.

"It's a system of law in which pregnant women are treated equally an underclass."

The authors debate that the bug at play here are greater than reproductive choice, only near women'due south rights.

"What we saw was not just a limitation on ballgame or reproductive rights, or even the deprivation of ceremonious liberties, but the denial of pregnant woman of virtually every right," said Lynn M. Paltrow, the executive manager of National Advocates for Significant Women and the lead author of the study in a call with reporters on Tuesday. "It's a organisation of law in which significant women are treated equally an underclass."

They also note that many women were charged nether state-level laws dealing with fetal homicide—or "feticide"—laws that were, in theory, designed to protect pregnant women from acts of violence and are now in place in 38 states. But rather than dealing with criminal acts confronting the women, they've been used to prosecute the women themselves.

Paltrow and coauthor Jeanne Flavin, a folklore professor at Fordham University, also related their findings to the so-called "personhood" movement, an farthermost anti-abortion effort that has sought to grant fertilized eggs the aforementioned rights every bit developed humans. While no states have passed that type of law, many are using other legal measures that, in do, grant fetuses precedent over the rights of the women carrying them. "The question isn't 'Are y'all for or against ballgame?'" said Paltrow. "It's, 'Do you believe that upon becoming significant, women become an underclass?'"

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Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/study-women-denied-legal-rights-because-pregnancy/

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