If the right succeeds in getting rid of Roe, the next step will be to criminalize women who have stillborn infants. It is already happening in Mississippi, and as David Pakman notes, it is now being considered in Kansas.
Pakman says that the next step after that would be for legislatures criminalizing a woman having their period; after all, what if that was a fertilized egg?
The bill itself would require doctors to report miscarriages to the state. The implication is obvious -- the state is seeking to pry into peoples' personal lives and looking for something they can prosecute. It would mandate the reporting of any miscarriage at any point in pregnancy to the state. Initially, it was a harmless bill that had to do with the filing of stillbirth certificates. But the real intent, as Pakman notes, is to find a new way to bypass Roe. "They try to do this at ever turn," he said in the video. As many as 15% of pregnancies in the first few weeks can end in miscarriage.
And in Mississippi, the prosecution of mothers who give birth to stillborn children has already begun. From the Washington Post link, quoting Pro Publica:
Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by “cocaine toxicity.”
In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for “depraved heart murder” — defined under Mississippi law as an act “eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
The prosecutor in the Mississippi case is Stephen Allgood and the medical examiner is Stephen Hayne. Both, according to the Post article, have a long history of botched investigations leading to people who were wrongfully convicted. And yet this is the sort of work that the State of Kansas is trying to replicate.
As long as the right tries to push the envelope in an attempt to control peoples' bodies, they are not credible when they claim that they are trying to get the government out of peoples' lives.
Cenk Uygur discussed the case on his show, The Young Turks. The Mississippi case involved the alleged use of cocaine. But Cenk said that there were all sorts of things that could harm a fetus if used by a woman who was pregnant. He asked if we were going to criminalize those behaviors as well. And Cenk said that the links between cocaine during pregnancy and developmental problems in babies were not clear.
Back during the 1980's, when the Reagan Administration was breaking out its "War on Drugs," there were constant public service announcements from Dr. Otis Bowen about how horrible drugs were. In one commercial, he talked about how heartbreaking it was to hold babies whose mothers had been addicted to cocaine. One common slogan used to describe cocaine was, "The Big Lie."
But in fact, the latest research backs Cenk that there is no clear link between cocaine exposure by pregnant women and developmental disabilities in the children after they were born. While cocaine can be harmful, poverty is a much more powerful predictor of how children develop, as a 20+ year study in Philadelphia found out:
The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn't see coming.
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.
Other researchers also couldn't find any devastating effects from cocaine exposure in the womb. Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. Her work has found that cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children's overall cognition and school performance, but some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.
Coles said her research had found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. "As a society we say, 'Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies,' " Coles said. "When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time."
Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrics professor at Boston University who has tracked a similar group of children, said the "crack baby" label led to erroneous stereotyping. "You can't walk into a classroom and tell this kid was exposed and this kid was not," Frank said. "Unfortunately, there are so many factors that affect poor kids. They have to deal with so much stress and deprivation. We have also found that exposure to violence is a huge factor."
So when the politicians are dragging their feet in Washington over extending unemployment benefits, they are doing much more harm to our children than anything that anyone decides to put in their bodies. And that makes these attempts to criminalize stillbirths and miscarriages even more ludicrous.