USA – Purvi Patel and the case of the self-managed abortion

Prosecutors—with the help of doctors and nurses—are punishing pregnant people using laws intended to help them.

Feb 8, 2021
Imani Gandy

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.

https://rewirenewsgroup.com/ablc/2021/02/08/purvi-patel-and-the-case-of-the-self-managed-abortion/

UK – Abortion should be a medical matter, not a criminal one. The law needs to change

Abortion should be a medical matter, not a criminal one. The law needs to change
Manifesto promises by Labour and the Liberal Democrats to decriminalise abortion are welcome news for women

Hilary Freeman
Sun 1 Dec 2019

There has been a predictably overwrought response to the election manifesto promises of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats to decriminalise abortion. Rightwing and Catholic commentators alike imagined hordes of heavily pregnant women at abortion clinics, demanding their fully formed foetuses be evacuated from their uteruses. Just because the law said that they now could.

I, unfortunately, know far more than I want to about what utter nonsense this emotive, anti-abortion rhetoric is. On 26 September 2012 I ended the life of my much-wanted daughter, Elodie, at 24 weeks’ gestation. It’s the hardest and most painful thing I’ve ever done. One thing I now know, with certainty, following this traumatic experience, is that no woman would choose to terminate a pregnancy that late on unless she felt there wasn’t any other option. And no doctor would countenance it, whatever the law said.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/uk-abortion-criminal-offence-24-week-time-limit

Born Alive Abortion Survivors: Parsing Fact from Fiction

Born Alive Abortion Survivors: Parsing Fact from Fiction

March 11, 2019
by Libby Anne

Last week, a friend sent me an article bearing the headline They Are Real: Meet Born-Alive Abortion Survivors. Could I maybe blog about it, she asked? This article led me down to a rabbit hole with numbers that kept getting bigger. When I reached an article that argued that there are 44,000 abortion survivors living in the U.S. today, I knew we had a definitional problem. What is really going on here?

The article my friend sent me profiled five individuals it labeled “abortion survivors.” These individuals are real people. The first one profiled Gianna Jesson, whose mother had a saline abortion at 30 weeks in 1977, and Gianna survived. When she was born alive, she was provided with care and given up for adoption. Melissa Ohden’s biological mother had a saline abortion at 31 weeks in 1977; she, too, survived and was provided care.

Continued: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2019/03/born-alive-abortion-survivors-parsing-fact-from-fiction.html

U.S. woman free after serving jail time for self-induced abortion

In this March 30, 2015 file photo, Purvi Patel is taken into custody at the St. Joseph County Courthouse in South Bend, Ind., after being sentenced to 20 years in prison for feticide and neglect of a dependent. (Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune via AP, File)

Rick Callahan, The Associated Press

Published Thursday, September 1, 2016 1:29PM EDT

INDIANAPOLIS -- An Indiana woman whose feticide conviction for a self-induced abortion was overturned in July walked out of prison Thursday, a day after a judge resentenced her to less time than she had already served and ordered her immediate release.

Purvi Patel, 35, was with relatives when she left the Indiana Women's Prison in Indianapolis about 10 a.m., said Indiana Department of Correction spokesman Doug Garrison.

Her attorney, Lawrence Marshall, said Patel is "very, very joyful that this day has come," but that she now needs privacy so that she can focus on rebuilding her life.

[continued at link]
Source: CTV News

01.09.2016