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This piece first appeared in our weekly e-newsletter, The Fallout. Join it right here.
Self-managed abortion isn’t a criminal offense in most states, however a brand new report launched this week by If/When/How particulars the very actual risk of prosecution for ending a being pregnant or serving to somebody to take action.
The report explores legal circumstances in 26 states, with a majority in Texas adopted by Ohio, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Virginia from 2000 to 2020. Throughout this time, no less than 61 individuals have been both criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their very own pregnancies or serving to another person finish theirs. A majority of the circumstances concerned treatment abortion, which underscores the anti-choice motion’s laser give attention to making an attempt to eradicate it any approach it will probably.
Additionally underscored within the report is the position health-care staff and obligatory reporting legal guidelines play within the pregnancy-to-prison pipeline. Obligatory reporting legal guidelines are the triggers that flip a health-care setting into one in all regulation enforcement. These legal guidelines unfairly deputize health-care staff into quasi-law enforcement brokers. Obligatory reporting legal guidelines typically put sufferers’ pursuits instantly at odds with their suppliers’. And the outcomes? Usually disastrous, particularly for Black and brown sufferers.
“As soon as regulation enforcement turned concerned in an grownup case, 87 % led to an arrest; of those, 42 circumstances proceeded by means of the legal courtroom course of,” the report acknowledged. In a single significantly egregious case, a girl was going through a number of fees for allegedly serving to her daughter acquire a medicine abortion, and the decide elevated her bail from $14,000 to $185,000 as a result of he was so upset {that a} “baby’s life was terminated.” In a medicine abortion.
To be taught extra concerning the results of abortion criminalization, learn this piece about misconceptions round punishing individuals who self-manage their abortion by one of many researchers of the If/When/How report, Laura Huss—who’s additionally a former Rewire Information Group colleague.
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