The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled patients cannot be prosecuted for self-inducing an abortion under the feticide statute, but left open the possibility other criminal charges could apply.
Attorneys for Patel, who was jailed following a miscarriage in 2013, claim prosecutors produced no evidence that the Indiana woman took medication to terminate her pregnancy.
Patel received a six-year sentence on the feticide charge, but that will be served concurrently with the 20-year sentence. She will spend five years on probation when she is released from prison.
The Purvi Patel prosecution shines a light on the terrifying conclusion to anti-abortion rhetoric that criminalizes pregnancy outcomes and pits the pregnant person against her fetus.
The story of Purvi Patel's prosecution, and the others lining up behind her, paint a bleak picture of life under the state's ultra-conservative Republican reign and give a frightening look of what's to come as increasingly draconian abortion restrictions force pregnant people to turn to other, sometimes illegal and often dangerous, means.
The Supreme Court won't take a look at Arizona's 20-week abortion ban, but it will consider a bunch of free speech challenges to abortion rights protections.
When viewed as part of this ”fetus first” landscape, fetal homicide laws quite plainly seek to exploit tragedies like that suffered by Heather Surovik in order to pursue an anti-choice agenda, which champions so-called personhood and seeks to eliminate safe abortion care access.
Traditionally, feticide charges aren't filed against the person who had been pregnant, though Indiana set a precedent for arresting such a person for feticide in the Bei Bei Shuai case.