Everyone accepts there are a few things that pregnancy entails such as morning sickness, hormonal fluctuation and children. Yet there is another thing that could come with it — a prison sentence.
Andrew Deskins | Argonaut
According to a recent report from The Advocate in Louisiana, a woman named Princess Beachem is being charged with second-degree feticide after delivering a stillborn. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison.
This whole story began when the coroner ruled the death a homicide. Detectives showed up in the intensive care to question her and she admitted she had used cocaine five days prior after her boyfriend, the father of the fetus, informed her he was leaving. She was charged with second-degree feticide, which would seem legally reasonable, until you check the legal definition of feticide in Louisiana– which exempts the mother in all cases. It also exempts doctors who provide legal abortions to women who consent to the procedure. So why is this woman facing charges?
Perhaps Louisiana is looking to the Mississippi State Supreme Court, where they reviewed a similar case. According to a report from Mother Jones, the defendant, Nina Buckhalter, also used drugs — in this case methamphetamines– which led a grand jury to declare she “did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, kill Hayley Jade Buckhalter, a human being, by culpable negligence.”
The legal system is all about setting of precedent. This case could set a dangerous precedent for pregnant women where unintentional pregnancy loss can be treated as homicide.
But the case of Alicia Beltran is perhaps the most chilling of all. According to The New York Times, Beltran, who lives in Wisconsin, told her doctor during a prenatal checkup that she had an addiction to pills the previous year, but had overcome the addiction on her own. Despite verifying her claim through a urine test, a doctor and a social worker accused her of endangering her child because she refused to start on an anti-addiction drug.
The report from the Times goes on to say that she was taken before a family court commissioner who brushed aside her pleas for a lawyer, yet the court had already appointed a legal guardian for the fetus.
This was all legal under a Wisconsin law colloquially known as the “cocaine mom” act, although Beltran’s detention is now being challenged as unconstitutional in a federal suit.
These three women are all prime examples of why the feverish full court press towards fetal personhood by socially conservative states is deeply dangerous. It creates laws that apply only to women, laws that tell them their bodies are not their own and their pregnancy comes at the risk of ending up in prison.
Women do not have any less value than fetuses, and if they miscarry they should not be held legally responsible. The thought of women addicted to drugs is horrible and sad, and this addiction causes the death of their unborn children, but again, it is all about precedent.
In the case involving Beachem, it seems fairly apparent that cocaine use resulted in her miscarriage, but where will the standard of proof be established? Is a woman who smokes, or is obese criminally culpable for a miscarriage?
These questions are not easy to answer, and they are downright terrifying for women, and the men who love them.
Marginalizing mothers while glorifying fetuses has to stop. Without the mother, the fetus will never become a child. It is a mother’s choice to carry a pregnancy to term, or to abort it before the fetus becomes viable, but should not come with the threat of legal consequences.
Andrew Deskins can be reached at [email protected]