In the fundamentalist Christian imagination, a loving couple conceives. Creates a sacrosanct life. And nine months later, another of God's children appears, bathed in the love of a beneficent deity. But that is not the reality of procreation.
Reproduction is a lottery. From 10-20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriages. However, as this unplanned event often happens before the woman knows she is pregnant, the actual miscarriage rate is higher, maybe significantly. Most occur in the first trimester. Sometimes tragedy strikes later on — by definition, as late as the 20th week.
Miscarriage is natural. Not criminal. Unless you live in West Virginia. There, the Raleigh County prosecuting attorney Tom Truman warned women suffering through the agony and depression of a miscarriage that they should report the matter to the police because:
"The kind of criminal jeopardy you face is going to depend on a lot of factors."
Truman warmed to his explication. During an interview with WVNS 59 News, he fleshed out his thinking,
"What was your intent? What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something, were you just so emotionally distraught you couldn't do anything else?"
He added: "If you were relieved, and you had been telling people, 'I'd rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,' that may play into law enforcement's thinking, too."
Initially, I thought that Truman was a fascist local official on the side of the pregnancy police. I was wrong. He is instead attempting to do right by women suffering from devastating news. He is trying to minimize the legal jeopardy faced by women living in a real-life Handmaid's Tale.
The Guardian reported it thus:
Truman said he was personally opposed to prosecuting women who miscarry, but other law enforcement officials in West Virginia had said they would be willing to do so under laws that dictate the disposal of human remains. Although West Virginia bans virtually all abortions, its ban – like other abortion bans in the US – does not penalize abortion patients but instead people who provide the procedure.
To protect themselves, Truman suggested that women call law enforcement after they have a miscarriage.
"Call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say, 'I miscarried. I want you to know,'" Truman said.
This is Orwellian. A woman who gets a banned abortion will not face prosecution. But a woman who intended to have the child but lost her fetus naturally risks being hauled into court. No woman should be charged with a crime for making reproductive choices. But holding a woman who didn't choose to end a pregnancy to a higher criminal liability than one who did makes no sense.
Note: I feel apprehensive writing that because, knowing the way the MAGA mind works, their answer would be to increase the criminal penalties for women making a choice. Not lowering them for women who didn't.
The Guardian gave some context:
The wave of state-level abortion bans that followed the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade sparked fears among women and abortion supporters that people who miscarry could face charges over their handling of fetal remains. As abortions and miscarriages – which are known in medical parlance as "spontaneous abortions" – can look deeply similar to medical professionals, abortion bans can incentivize police to treat pregnancy losses like crime scenes.
And added examples of out-of-control prosecutors.
In 2023, a woman in Ohio was charged with felony abuse of a corpse after she miscarried into a toilet. A grand jury ultimately decided not to indict. Earlier this year, after a Georgia woman suffered a miscarriage and was found bleeding in a parking lot, police charged her with concealing the death of another person and throwing away or abandoning a dead body. Those charges were dropped.
It is not just unfair. It is cruel. We should not be surprised. One of conservatism's defining features is a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Dana Sussman, SVP of the reproductive-rights organization Pregnancy Justice, pointed out the capricious and ignorant reaction to miscarriage in the post-Dobbs era. She said in a statement issued after news of the Georgia case broke.
"There is no one-size-fits-all way to handle fetal remains in these situations – in fact, doctors often tell women to simply miscarry at home.
No one is taught how to handle fetal remains, and police and prosecutors should not be weighing in on how women in this situation respond."
Prosecuting a woman who has had a miscarriage is like charging someone who lost their wallet with theft. However, that comparison does not begin to address the difference in grief. The forced birth zealots aren't Christian — they're monsters.
