Georgia Police Jailed Woman for Miscarriage and Performed Autopsy on Her Miscarried Fetus.

[CopiousX]

a 19-week old fetus isn't a human, no premature birth that early has ever survived

Did you read my final paragraph? I think it would apply to you

 

[broller]

a 19-week old fetus isn't a human, no preemie born that early has ever survived

But by that logic, a baby born at 28 weeks who didn't surviver 100 years ago was not human, but a baby born at 28 weeks in today's day and age is human. That doesn't make sense.

 

[Neuromancer]

It's a southern religious state of course a fetus has more rights than a woman.

 

[Kasgoinjail]

But by that logic, a baby born at 28 weeks who didn't surviver 100 years ago was not human, but a baby born at 28 weeks in today's day and age is human. That doesn't make sense.

My son born at 27 weeks my freinds daughter at 24 weeks

The confusion around law and reproduction will have many more fatal ramifications


Do u blame Biden?

 

[east]

Did you read my final paragraph? I think it would apply to you

there's no such thing as "proper disposal procedure," the medical community's instructions, for decades, has been to discard spontaneously aborted fetuses in the most convenient manner available. it's simply dead flesh and the recommendation's always been to flush it down the toilet, bury it, cremate it, or simply throw it away.

edit: from the uk gov't, they tell you treat the remains like you would a used tampon: https://www.liverpoolwomens.nhs.uk/...ins-following-miscarriage-at-home-leaflet.pdf

georgian legislators, going against all medical consensus, made the only legal pathway to disposal be going to an er so the remains can be sent into the medical waste incinerator. if she did go, the state would have tried to force her to term since the fetus had a heartbeat. then, she's risking dying of sepsis and being stuck with a huge bill. women in texas, faced with the same sophie's choice, have died from that "unintended" consequence.* if the woman was found outside unconscious and bleeding, she was obviously in a bad enough way that the legal pathway would have been a death sentence too.

*air quotes because laws like this disproportionately harm the indigent, and white southern legislators know what race is over-represented amongst their poor

But by that logic, a baby born at 28 weeks who didn't surviver 100 years ago was not human, but a baby born at 28 weeks in today's day and age is human. That doesn't make sense.

of course it does, viability's always been the threshold of life, for every species. as medical advances drive the age of viability down and save more preemies, so the definition of personhood changes. the only differing views are from religious absolutists who think it begins at fertilization.

 

[Pull Up the Roots]

I see nothing wrong here. You can't just be throwing human beings into dumpsters. The minute it came out, it had rights. And it's existence was already documented by the OBGYN and her primary care physician.

Imagine the garbage man coming in the morning to find a squishy infant in a glad Force flex. Dude would have a heart attack, and still end up calling the police on the mother.


Even if you want to pretend that it's not a person, you should at least follow proper disposal and sharpes procedures given the pathogens the fetus could be spreading.

The Autopsy: According to the autopsy, the fetus was 19 weeks old at the time of the miscarriage. There were no signs of trauma and the fetus did not take a breath. The coroner’s office ruled it to be a occurring miscarriage. At 19 weeks, a fetus is about the size of a mango and lungs are just beginning to develop but are not fully developed yet.

Woman Arrested After Miscarriage In Georgia Under Abortion Law

A 24-year-old Tifton woman faces criminal charges after experiencing a miscarriage, raising concerns about the application of Georgia's strict abortion

thegeorgiasun.com

What? Sorry, but what you're saying is completely detached from the reality of what happened.

First, the autopsy confirmed this was a miscarriage at 19 weeks, and that the fetus - it was a fetus, not a human being, and not an infant - never took a breath, and that there was no trauma.

Second, Georgia law states that a baby is only legally recognized as "born alive" if it has had "an independent and separate existence from its mother," which wasn't the case here.

Finally, Georgia has no official guidance on what to do with fetal remains after a miscarriage at home. If Georgia wants to mandate specific procedures, they should provide clear guidance instead of throwing women in jail. These kinds of backwards laws only serve to create an environment of fear that forces women away from seeking medical care because they're afraid they'll be arrested for something beyond their control.

 

[east]

All charges have been dismissed against a 24-year-old woman in Tifton, Georgia, who was arrested last month after she lost her pregnancy at 19 weeks, the Tift County district attorney’s office announced on Friday. The case had alarmed reproductive-health advocates, who said it was the first time authorities had attempted to use a fetal-personhood law that has been on the books in Georgia since 2019 to bring criminal charges against someone.

The woman, who was found bleeding and unconscious from a miscarriage, was charged on March 21 with concealing the death of another and abandonment of a dead body after she disposed of the fetal remains at the dumpster of her apartment complex. She could have faced up to 13 years in prison if found guilty. But Tift County district attorney Patrick Warren said that his office is dropping the charges because “continuing prosecution is not legally sustainable and not in the interest of justice.”

Advocates said the charges being dropped was the only appropriate outcome in this case. “I want to emphasize that these charges should have never been brought in the first place,” says Dana Sussman, senior vice-president of the legal-advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. “We were interrogating Georgia law, trying to figure out what the legal theory was, and we could not identify one.”

Sussman says her organization often sees these sorts of overzealous judgment calls from law enforcement given how heavily policed pregnancy is in the current political landscape. “Imagine if there is the discovery of fetal remains, and it’s treated as a health issue,” she says. “Like, let’s make sure that this woman gets the care that she needs without ever involving or connecting it to law enforcement. But we are seeing these things treated as criminal acts when these are natural and normal occurrences that happen to pregnant bodies.”

Though pregnancy criminalization has long been an issue in the U.S., there has been an uptick in cases since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly three years ago. A Pregnancy Justice report found that in the first year after Dobbs, at least 210 people faced criminal charges in connection with their pregnancies — the most in a single year that the organization has tracked. Twenty-two of those cases involved miscarriages or stillbirths.

In these cases, people often have been prosecuted for what they do with the fetal remains, as there are no laws or universal standards either in Georgia or elsewhere in the U.S. dictating how to dispose of them. “We have seen criminal charges associated with disposing of it in a dumpster,” Sussman says. “We’ve seen criminal charges when people have shown up at the hospital with fetal remains. We’ve seen criminal charges when people have buried fetal remains.”

Sussman hopes that the woman at the center of the Georgia case can now move on and heal. “The harm and the trauma of this experience — by virtue of being arrested and facing these kinds of charges after a devastating medical emergency — are still very real,” Sussman says. The woman’s family has created a GoFundMe to help them navigate an incident that they say had caused everyone “emotional, financial, and mental stress.”

https://www.thecut.com/article/prosecutor-drops-charges-over-georgia-womans-miscarriage.html