Criminalizing miscarriage
Oh good, now we’re going the “treat miscarriage as child murder” route.
In March, a woman miscarried in a Spokane hotel. Police investigated. They searched her room, told her they’d meet her at the hospital and found it suspicious when she did not show up. They filed a search warrant in hopes of finding her.
Considering the fetus her dependent, officers suspected that the woman could be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child if she did not call 911 soon enough to potentially save her pregnancy, according to a warrant filed at the time.
A fetus is not a child. Abortion is still legal.
Sara Ainsworth, a Seattle attorney with national nonprofit IfWhenHow, which focuses on reproductive law, said she could not find any reason to suspect a crime in the warrant filed in Spokane County Superior Court.
“Under Washington law, everything about this is discriminatory and potentially violating of constitutional rights,” Ainsworth said.
…
The case arises as reproductive freedoms have been restricted in Republican-led Legislatures from Texas to Idaho, and with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to curtail or even overturn the abortion rights enshrined in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. While abortion remains legal in all 50 states, Ainsworth said under Washington’s Equal Rights Amendment, investigating pregnancy losses could be discriminatory as such investigations are necessarily biased against women, Ainsworth said.
…
On March 24, a woman in her early 20s miscarried in a hotel room in downtown Spokane. A 911 caller, unidentified in the warrant, told a dispatcher that the fetus was about five weeks along.
EMTs who arrived at the hotel room were all men and the miscarrying woman refused to let them in, asking for a female medic instead, according to the warrant. When the woman EMT arrived, she saw a dead fetus in the room’s toilet. She estimated the fetus to be about five months along, according to the warrant.
The EMT urged the bleeding woman to go to the hospital and the woman resisted before texting a friend who she said could drive her there, the warrant said.
In the meantime, three police officers arrived. According to the warrant, EMTs called police “due to the fact that they believed the female needed to get medical attention and that something needed to be done with the fetus which was still in the toilet.”
After knocking on the hotel room door to no answer, the three officers decided to enter the room to ensure “nobody was inside destroying evidence,” the warrant said.
Don’t call the police on a woman who’s had a miscarriage.
H/t takshak
Wait, wait, wait. Isn’t the priority that police *should* be called on *all* people who’ve experienced pregnancy? Where is the inclusion, Ophelia?
This is so messed up. I wonder if the woman were black.
IMHO, the only philosophically consistent and somewhat defensible position against abortion is that of the Catholic Church. It holds human life to begin at conception, not at some arbitrarily chosen point in time afterwards,
Given that, every Catholic woman should take her sanitary napkins to church, so that the priest can perform the Last Rites over them, just in case there is a zygote or early embryo with an immortal soul somewhere in amonst that assemblage.
As baptism would never be possible, the child would have to spend all the time between the present and Judgement Day in Limbo. Come Judgement Day, that same immortal soul would be judged and promoted into the Heavenly Choir there to sing God’s praise 24/7 for the rest of Eternity.
This is based on my reading of Catholic theological pamphlets. Readers please note that I am not a trained theologian.
No actually you wonder if she was black. Making it “if she were” changes the meaning (and makes the sentence incomplete).
Maybe make it “wonder if she is” because she reportedly survived the incident. Miscarrying while black is probably like driving while black.
It’s ok, Omar @2, it didn’t sound preachy. :D
Yes, “is” would solve the problem neatly.
Seth@1,
To be safe, we should just lock up all women (excuse me, uterus-havers) through menopause.
I was using the past subjunctive in an indirect question. (If I had been using the present tense, I would have said “I wonder if she be black.”) I know you don’t like it. I’m trying to wean myself off of such Latinese usages, at least in this forum, since I know you don’t like it. I’m working on it; cut me some slack for now, please. (And yes, English is my native language; I’ve been doing this Latinese affectation only for the past two or three years.)
Didn’t the CDC suggest, a few years ago, that all pregnant women and “all woman that might become pregnant” (or something like that) should entirely avoid alcohol?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/02/04/465607147/women-blast-cdcs-advice-to-use-birth-control-if-drinking-alcohol
I wrote a book based on that very premise. Only they have to take it every month to a clinic. If a fertilized egg is found, the woman is arrested and convicted.
Didn’t they do away with Limbo? According to Reuters, it no longer exists. (Too unpopular with the masses.)
One of the most horrifying things is that this is happening in a blue state. I could see this happening in Texas, or Alabama, but Washington?
Surely, at five weeks it’s an embryo, not a fœtus, and wouldn’t be discernible amongst the debris in the toilet, being absolutely minute (less than 2mm long). Something about this story smells.
Tigger, the story says it was about the size of a fist, and they estimated it to be about 20 weeks along. That was one of the things that made them suspicious, because the 911 call said five weeks. But I have discovered a lot of people don’t know much about things happening in their body, and may trace the length of pregnancy to the point they learned about it. It seems odd not discovering your pregnancy until your 15th week, but in my pregnancy, I hadn’t gained much weight or had any symptoms other than missed periods and morning sickness by that time. Women who are less knowledgeable, maybe haven’t had any sort of sexual education, may not be able to figure times as accurately; and if she wasn’t able to afford a doctor, she might not realize how far along she was.
The article said the paper was unable to discern if the woman was black (is black).
Second time in 24 hours that you’ve invoked lack of sexual education as a source of big problems. Seems you’re really on to something.
If you have irregular periods you can miss the early stages of pregnancy easily, too. It’s not like our bodies are machines.
iknklast @ 12 – Washington east of the Cascades is a red state. It’s the same with Oregon – Malheur is in the red section, which I always figured is why the Bundys felt comfortable doing their “occupation” there. Overall they both come out blue because population is much denser west of the Cascades. Urban/rural divide writ large.
GW,
Applying Latin rules to English is like applying rugby rules to football*. I mean, both have offsides, but they’re not the same thing.
*British, American, Canadian, Australian–the analogy still holds.
And when applying Latin rules to English creates a sentence whose meaning is different from the intended meaning, it becomes a nuisance.
Also, to be honest…”weaning” yourself? Come on. It’s not an addiction. And what do you mean cut you some slack? I didn’t shout at you or abuse you, I just pointed out the garbled meaning. I’m not depriving you of slack, I’m just requesting that you stop deliberately obfuscating your own meaning by applying Latin grammar.
@GW #9
The problem is the you should have said: I wonder if the woman were black, what would have happened to her.
Iknklast:
An infallible pope did so, as I recall. Except……. that very decision meant that all those millions, billions even, of innocent souls of the unborn either got kicked upstairs to Heaven or became fuel for the fires of Hell. As in so many situations, abolition of a solution automatically restored the problem that the solution was meant to address.
If one can go direct to Heaven without first having lived a life on which a divine judgement can be made, what is the point of being born? Safest option is not to be born, if one can avoid it; which would mean that Death and his agents did all those aborted and miscarried fetuses a great big favour: a 100% guaranteed ticket on the escalator to that great big shining and glorious new world upstairs.
Many of them otherwise would not have made it.
Exactly, Omar. I never claimed Catholic doctrine was consistent. After all, if an infallible leader could create limbo, and a later infallible leader could abolish it, how infallible are they?
Ophelia, I do sort of know that; California is the same way. I wasn’t totally clear on what part Spokane was in, and have been cleaning furiously for an upcoming guest and felt too lazy to look at a map. :-)
Of course, in the Midwest we’re just all red all the time. :-(
Well it’s always tricky. Red states like Georgia have islands of blue like Atlanta. Blue states have islands of red. It’s impossible to keep track of all of them!
True. We do have Omaha (after the last election, some were calling it Jomaha).
Pshhhh, it’s fine. Ophelia, you’ve been absolutely polite and reasonable, as always — and one of the reasons that I love this blog so much is that both you and your commenters conduct discourse on such a civil and intelligent level (unlike the toxicity so ubiquitous on the internet). My comment about “cut me some slack” was a defensive action, fueled by my own anxieities of becoming a persona non grata in this wonderful space.
Oh tut, that’s not going to happen. You also conduct discourse on such a civil and intelligent level, so no persona non grata for you.
Now I should offer a Latin tag for dessert. How about
Odi profanum vulugus et arceo.
Profanum vulgus=people who don’t conduct discourse that way.
Nice. And yay!
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines”… :D
Re a woman not knowing she’s pregnant, there have been several cases of women unaware they were pregnant until they gave birth. Unusual, strange, but it does happen.
About blue islands in red seas: here’s a good article from CNN about the increasing tension between red states and their blue cities, and the efforts of the states to override the actions of the cities that don’t comport with conservative views.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/politics/red-states-blue-cities-counties/index.html
@3, @21 Fred Clark wrote a memorable post on this subject, with the creepy and unsettling image of the vast majority of the inhabitants of heaven being uncommunicative, insensate blobs of tissue, humans who have never actually lived lives, floating around in perpetual bliss.
I understand that there’s a whole TV show about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Didn't_Know_I_Was_Pregnant