Considering the troubling case of Rennie Gibbs, who may face a murder charge for her daughter’s stillbirth, Eve Tushnet criticizes pro-life laws that make criminals out of pregnant women:
In 2006, 15-year-old Rennie Gibbs became pregnant. She tested positive for marijuana and cocaine during her pregnancy. Her daughter Samiya was born a month premature, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. An autopsy on the child found traces of a cocaine byproduct, and Rennie was charged with murder—or rather, with what Mississippi calls “depraved heart murder,” signifying an especially callous crime. Gibbs’s case has wound its way through the legal system, and it is still unclear whether she will go on trial this spring; but if she does, Gibbs, now 23, will face the threat of life in prison. …
[T]hese fetal harm laws, however well-meaning, suggest a slippery slope toward precisely Rennie Gibbs’s predicament. Criminal investigations into every miscarriage, heavy sentences for women caught smoking a single joint or struggling to quit cigarettes, legal penalties for failing to follow every jot of the ever-shifting “expert opinion” on pregnancy: The closer this world seems, the less willing abortion-rights supporters will be to even consider the humanity of the unborn. And some women have already slipped to the bottom of the slope.
Nina Martin examines what’s at stake in the Gibbs case:
Prosecutors argue that the state has a responsibility to protect children from the dangerous actions of their parents. Saying Gibbs should not be tried for murder is like saying that “every drug addict who robs or steals to obtain money for drugs should not be held accountable for their actions because of their addiction,” the state attorney general’s office wrote in a brief to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
But some civil libertarians and women’s rights advocates worry that if Gibbs is convicted, the precedent could inspire more prosecutions of Mississippi women and girls for everything from miscarriage to abortion—and that African Americans, who suffer twice as many stillbirths as whites, would be affected the most.
And Tara Culp-Ressler traces the controversy back to the crack baby myth:
In the 1980s, when crack cocaine use became more widespread, the media stoked unfounded fears about cocaine’s damaging effects on unborn children in the womb. According to the national media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), “few media fabrications have been as invidious, persistent or politically devastating as that of the so-called ‘crack baby.’” Eager to demonstrate that they were tough on drugs, prosecutors began going after pregnant women for using drugs because they were an easy target.
But it’s not even clear that cocaine actually harms fetuses in the first place. Several large studies into the subject have found that there’s no difference in long-term health outcomes between children who were exposed to cocaine in the womb and children who were not. Researchers agree that health disparities among children should actually be attributed to poverty, not to drug use.
The Dish 