From Imani Gandy at Rewire News Group:
Prosecutors—with the help of doctors and nurses—are punishing pregnant people using laws intended to help them.
Purvi Patel was suffering from heavy vaginal bleeding when she walked into the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Mishawaka, Indiana. She insisted that the bleeding was not the result of pregnancy. After the doctors persisted, however, she admitted that she’d had a miscarriage, and, not knowing what to do, had placed the remains in a dumpster.
What came next is a cautionary tale about what can happen to Black and brown women when they face bias and betrayal by health-care workers who are supposed to help them, and the ways in which hospitals, which are supposed to be places of healing, can become carceral.
Patel likely believed she would get medical treatment and then be able go home to her family. But overzealous law enforcement and prosecutors—and a betrayal of trust by the medical staff who were supposed to treat her—left Patel facing 41 years in prison for an illegal self-induced abortion.
How could this have happened?