All Women's Medical of Queens

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All Women's Medical Pavilion on Google Nexplanon: Nexplanon is a small, thin and flexible rod-like implant that prevents pregnancy for up to 3 years. After the device has placed in your arm by your health care provider, hormone is slowly released into the body to prevent ovulation. Considered to be over 99% effective, it is easy-to-use,....

All Women's Medical Pavilion on Google Kyleena: Kyleena is a small, T-shaped device that is placed in the uterus and provides pregnancy prevention for up to 5 years. Kyleena releases a continuous low dose of hormone that suppresses ovulation and inhibits s***m movement. This IUD (intra-uterine device) is considered to be over 99% effecti...

All Women's Medical Pavilion on Google Paragard (also known as the Copper IUD) is a non-hormonal m**hod of birth control that provides pregnancy prevention for up to 10years. Paragard is a small, T-shaped device that’s placed in the uterus by your health care provider. The device is made of plastic and a small amount of copper- which i...

All Women's Medical Pavilion on Google Kyleena is a small, T-shaped device that is placed in the uterus and provides pregnancy prevention for up to 5 years. Kyleena releases a continuous low dose of hormone that suppresses ovulation and inhibits s***m movement. This IUD (intra-uterine device) is considered to be over 99% effective and pl...

All Women's Medical Pavilion on Google The RU486, also known as the Abortion Pill, is a safe and effective way to end an early pregnancy in the privacy of your home. The process consists of taking two medications: mifepristone is taken at the doctor’s office to stop the growth of the pregnancy, then misoprostol is taken at home to indu...

Texas Abortion Providers Are “Hitting Their Limits”
https://abortion-blog.com/2021/10/26/texas-abortion-providers-are-hitting-their-limits/

Clinic staff are “very worried” about the stability of their jobs, explained one provider. And turning away patient after patient is taking its toll.

AUSTIN, TEX.—Months before Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) went into effect, staff and providers at Whole Woman’s Health—a network of abortion clinics—anxiously braced for the impact of one of the most extreme anti-choice laws in the United States. They spent countless hours in meetings strategizing how best to comply with the onerous Texas law, which bars abortion care once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, typically around six weeks of pregnancy. As more than 80 percent of pregnant people in the state receive care past this time frame, the law amounts to a near-total abortion ban.

However, nothing—not even the state’s roughly one-month Covid-19 abortion ban last year—could quite prepare the staff for the deep trauma they would face turning away hundreds of patients indefinitely over the next several weeks.

“My staff is dealing with emotional and psychological exhaustion as they are forced to be agents of the state against their will and comply with a remarkably cruel law they fundamentally disagree with,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, Whole Woman’s Health president and founder. “This law is taking a huge toll on them—they are facing day-to-day trauma.”

Clinic staff find themselves on the other end of understandably angry and anguished daily calls from patients who are blocked from receiving the timely care they need in their home state. Whole Woman’s must also resist the desperation of some patients, past the six-week mark, who plead with clinic staff to meet them in the parking lot for abortion-inducing pills or for an after-hours procedure. Staff don’t give in; however, many are reaching their emotional thresholds.

“Our staff are compassionate people but are being forced to constantly say ‘no’ to patients under the law—and they are hitting their limits,” said Hagstrom Miller. “I’ve heard some say: ‘I’ve said as many “no”s as I can, I don’t know how much more I can take.’”

In effect since September 1 because the US Supreme Court refused to intervene, SB 8 has forced most abortion care in the second-largest state in the country to cease, pushing pregnant people to venture out of state for care—that is, only if they are able to secure the resources to do so—or carry unplanned pregnancies to term.

In a scathing ruling on October 6, US Judge Robert Pitman paused SB 8 in response to a legal challenge from the US Department of Justice, deeming the law an “offensive deprivation” of constitutional rights. However, the largely conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, appeasing Texas officials, reinstated the law just two days later. The dizzying legal volley while the bill moves through the courts adds to the uncertainty and anxiety felt by patients, providers, and clinic staff.

Compounding the daily trauma for staff is the threat to their livelihoods: In addition to barring the overwhelming majority of abortion care, the law includes a novel legal provision that empowers private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” abortion care. And those who sue are incentivized by a $10,000 award if the suits prove successful. As a result, the law opens the door for an army of anti-choice vigilantes to sue providers—or potentially those tangentially supporting abortion—at any point, leaving clinics deeply vulnerable.

Additionally, a provision in the law says that even if a temporary injunction is in place, providers could still be subject to retroactive litigation if the legal pause on the law is eventually stayed. (Malpractice insurance does not cover her providers for this kind of suit, stressed Hagstrom Miller.) And even if a lawsuit against an abortion provider is found to be frivolous, physicians would still need to disclose that they had been sued when applying for licenses, certifications, or hospital admitting privileges, potentially jeopardizing their careers.

Hagstrom Miller says of her 17 physicians at four centers across Texas, only half have felt comfortable continuing abortion care within the confines of the law; the other half fear liability and will resume procedures only if the law is permanently blocked. The majority of providers are young women—some who fly in from out of state—and are still paying off student loans and building their nascent careers. Her clinic staff similarly are largely women of color—many are parents and must weigh the risk to their livelihoods. While a handful of clinic staff have exited since the law was passed in May, the majority have stayed on.

But those who have stayed on remain “very worried” and “extremely anxious” about the stability of their jobs. Since the law took effect, clinics are seeing fewer patients, which has the effect of severely straining their incomes.

“If we can’t see patients, we don’t have income—so by default this could be a clinic closure law,” Hagstrom Miller said, adding that Whole Woman’s clinics are only seeing about 20 percent of the patients they normally do.

Hagstom Miller is all too familiar with the possible outcome of Texas anti-abortion laws intentionally meant to strangle clinics financially and operationally. Following the passage of 2013’s House Bill 2, a Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider, or TRAP law, three Whole Woman’s Health clinics were forced to shutter their doors, along with half the state’s clinics overall, dropping the number from around 40 to less than 20. It took one year for Hagstrom Miller’s McAllen location to reopen; three years for the Austin flagship center; and the Beaumont clinic never opened its doors again. Even after the US Supreme Court struck down two key portions of HB 2 in 2016, most abortion clinics in Texas have not been able to reopen.

While no Texas clinic so far has indicated it is at risk for immediate closure, independent providers face a greater threat than nationally affiliated organizations like Planned Parenthood, as they lack the name recognition and fundraising and mobilizing power, said Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network, the national association for independent, community-based abortion care providers.

“We know that all abortion clinics need the support of their communities to weather these storms, but, unfortunately, fewer people know about indies—and that means that fewer donations, volunteers, and other forms of support are directed their way,” said Madsen.

Fourteen of the 20 clinics in Texas are independent providers, and in the United States generally, indies provide three of every five abortions, making up the majority of clinics that provide care after the first trimester. Because indies are so fundamental to abortion access in this country, the threat of closure also represents a “disproportionate threat to meaningful abortion access overall,” stressed Madsen. That’s why her group created Keep Our Clinics, a centralized fundraising program, to help independent clinics, which need tens of thousands of dollars each month to stay afloat.

“While advocates on the ground and legal experts across the country work to defeat the current abortion ban in Texas, we are working collectively to keep Texas clinics open and support clinics in surrounding states,” said Madsen.

Although providers at bigger institutions may benefit from the support of a national network, they have not been immune to the stress SB 8 has created for clinic staff. Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a physician at Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston, said SB 8’s potential to increase harassment and threats of litigation has only amplified the jarring feeling he has felt practicing abortion care in a conservative state hostile to abortion rights. The law has prevented the Houston clinic from providing abortion care to nearly 500 patients, which is “disturbing,” to Kumar personally and professionally.

The Houston clinic is also experiencing difficulty in hiring new staff and, like the staff at Whole Woman’s Health, its current team is concerned about their financial stability, he said. Some are in debt; some are caretakers; some are parents; and their livelihoods and futures are compromised because of SB 8.

“There is a heavy cloud of uncertainty above all of us,” said Kumar. “It’s unsettling that our jobs are so in flux. We are human. We have lives—we have partners, family members, children. The threat of SB 8 has a ripple effect. It changes not just how we interact with our patients but how we interact with friends and family, how we plan for our lives and futures. It is draining us every day.”

Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/texas-abortion-clinics/

Supreme Court Fast-Tracks Arguments for Texas SB 8
https://abortion-blog.com/2021/10/25/supreme-court-fast-tracks-arguments-for-texas-sb-8/

In just one week, the Supreme Court will hear two cases related to Texas’ near-total abortion ban.

“I’m being forced to inflict pain on my patients when the reason I became a doctor was to help and to heal them.”

Dr. Amna Dermish, the regional medical director at Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, was describing the times she’s had to turn patients away since Texas’ near-total abortion ban, SB 8, took effect in September. Dermish broke down in tears during a press call Friday, just hours after the Supreme Court announced it would hear two challenges to the law on November 1—while allowing the ban to stay in effect until then.

By refusing to block the ban, the justices are already indicating a degree of sympathy toward the law. It’s particularly devastating considering the immediate, day-to-day impact SB 8 is having on Texans.

Now that the Supreme Court has fast-tracked a Texas SB 8 hearing onto the docket—it usually takes months from when the justices agree to hear a case to the actual arguments—it’s setting up to be a huge term for abortion rights. The Court had already set December 1 as the date to hear Mississippi’s 15-week ban, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

How we got here
Back in May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 8 into law, banning abortions as soon as embryonic cardiac activity is detected, typically around six weeks. This is well before viability, and pre-viability abortion bans are unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade. But that didn’t stop Texas lawmakers in their quest to punish anyone who provides an abortion or who “aids and abets” someone in getting an abortion, including anyone who drives a patient to a procedure or helps them pay.

And as if a six-week abortion ban with virtually no exceptions isn’t ghoulish enough, the law’s enforcement mechanism deputizes anyone to sue people who violate the law, essentially putting a bounty on anyone who helps someone access abortion.

Abortion providers and advocates sued in an attempt to block the law from going into effect on September 1, and SB 8 has been ping-ponging around the courts since then.

And now here we are—the fate of abortion access lies in the hands of a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority.

What’s at issue
The Court will review the enforcement mechanism that allows any private citizen to sue. You see, the anti-choice lawmakers who drafted SB 8 devised the law to circumvent the judicial precedent that the state cannot interfere with abortion before viability. Their logic is that by shifting that responsibility of enforcement onto citizens, they can basically render the constitutionality of abortion moot.

It’s actually two cases that the justices will hear: Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the case brought by the providers, and United States v. Texas, a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice.

Marc Hearron, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said Friday on the press call that if the Supreme Court were to approve of a law like SB 8, the decision would essentially dismantle the Court’s authority to enforce protections of constitutional rights going forward.

“Every individual constitutional right is at stake,” he said.

What’s next
The justices will hear oral arguments in the two cases a week from today. Advocates say a ruling from the Court could come anytime, including as early as Friday, November 5.

Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/10/25/supreme-court-fast-tracks-arguments-for-texas-sb-8/

The Fate of Roe v. Wade May Rest on This Woman’s Shoulders
https://abortion-blog.com/2021/10/23/the-fate-of-roe-v-wade-may-rest-on-this-womans-shoulders/

The night before Julie Rikelman was scheduled to argue before the Supreme Court for the first time, she hardly slept at all. But it wasn’t nerves that kept her up. It was a persistent fire alarm at the Washington, D.C. hotel where she was staying. It went off again and again for hours on end, she remembers, laughing.

Despite the mayhem, Rikelman, the litigation director at the Center for Reproductive Rights who colleagues describe as “unflappable,” stood before the high court the next day to argue the first abortion-related case since Trump-appointed conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh arrived on the bench. She left the oral arguments feeling confident and several months later, she learned she’d tallied up another win. The court sided with the Louisiana abortion clinic that Rikelman represented, holding that the state’s law put an undue burden on those seeking abortions—as was the case when they struck down a nearly identical Texas law in 2016. Abortion rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief.

But all the drama of that March 2020 argument—which unfolded just before COVID-19 shut the country down—pales in comparison to the pressure Rikelman and the Center for Reproductive Rights are facing now. On Dec. 1, Rikelman will again appear before the Supreme Court to argue against yet another state law, this one from Mississippi, that represents the biggest threat to abortion access that the country has seen in decades.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization centers on a 2018 Mississippi law that would prohibit almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Unlike the Louisiana case that Rikelman successfully argued before SCOTUS in 2020, this law does not add requirements for those providing abortions; it seeks to outlaw the procedure entirely. The Mississippi law represents a direct, unalloyed challenge to the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, in which the court found that people have the constitutional right to an abortion until the point when a fetus can survive outside the womb, or about 24 weeks into pregnancy.

That the Supreme Court agreed to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization at all came as a shock to Rikelman and her colleagues. But then the news got worse: the Court announced it would not only hear the case, it would consider the question of whether all laws that ban abortion pre-viability are unconstitutional. In other words, the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority featuring Amy Coney Barrett in place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is prepared to review the precedent of Roe v. Wade itself.

“It’s been clear for 50 years that a ban like Mississippi’s is unconstitutional,” Rikelman says. “If the Supreme Court upholds this ban, it will have effectively overturned Roe v. Wade.”

The case comes at a delicate political moment. In the past year, state legislatures have passed a record-breaking 106 new laws restricting abortion and, in September, Texas implemented the nation’s single strictest abortion law since 1973, banning nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The Texas law may also come before the Supreme Court this term. The stakes of this moment, Rikelman says, are “monumental.”

Abortion rights activists protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., March 4.

Abortion rights activists protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., March 4. Saul Loeb—AFP/Getty Images

A grounding in human rights
Rikelman has been preparing for this fight for decades. Born in Kyiv, she immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1979 after they experienced severe discrimination in the former Soviet Union for being Jewish. Her mother was blocked from medical school because of her religion, and when her parents arrived here barely speaking English, they had to restart their careers from scratch. Rikelman herself learned English as a second language, and says seeing her family’s struggle shaped her interest in civil rights from an early age. “I definitely grew up thinking about how important it was for people to be able to make personal decisions about their lives for themselves,” she says, “and not have the government make those decisions for them.”

In school, Rikelman sometimes felt like an outsider. But in college, she found her niche. She remembers taking a class on s*x discrimination that introduced her to Supreme Court cases about reproductive rights. She’d found her calling. She still keeps that college textbook in her office. Some of the cases she reads now in her work at the Center for Reproductive Rights are the same ones she underlined as a 19-year-old. After falling in love with constitutional law, Rikelman clerked for a judge at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and the first female judge on the Alaska Supreme Court, then accepted a fellowship at the Center for Reproductive Rights, the powerful non-profit that was founded in 1992 to represent the abortion clinic at the heart of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the lesser-known Supreme Court case that upheld the right to abortion that year. After a stint as vice president of litigation at NBC Universal, Rikelman returned to the Center in 2011 and has been there ever since.

In years after the Center for Reproductive Rights was founded, it grew quickly into a legal powerhouse, employing 75 lawyers and wielding a $40 million budget to fight many of the country’s high-profile abortion legal battles, often alongside Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. More recently, its role has become even more outsized. In the decade since Rikelman joined the Center as a senior attorney, the types of lawsuits aimed at abortion access have changed. “We were always fighting restrictions that are burdensome and make it harder to access reproductive health care,” says Nancy Northup, the president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “But not flat out bans. The boldness of the restrictions, the fact that we are litigating at the Supreme Court the question about whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned, was nowhere on the horizon 19 years ago.”

As the challenges to abortion access have become more pronounced, Rikelman’s experience has accumulated. “Julie has a first rate legal mind. But she doesn’t have a trace of arrogance about it,” Northup says. “It makes her an incredibly effective advocate because she is not letting any kind of ego get in the way of the way that she argues in the courtroom.”Rikelman speaks to abortion rights supporters after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on March 4, 2020

Rikelman speaks to abortion rights supporters after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on March 4, 2020 Alyssa Schukar—Center for Reproductive Rights/AP

‘Concerning for the rule of law’
For decades, abortion opponents have worked closely with conservative lawmakers at the state level to limit abortion in a variety of ways. They have, for example, put in place an array of requirements ostensibly aimed at protecting patient safety but that really make it difficult for doctors to practice and for clinics to stay open. Abortion rights advocates call those TRAP laws: Target Regulation of Abortion Providers laws. But over the years, efforts to reduce and ban access to abortion have gotten less subtle. Instead of adding facility requirements or mandating hospital admitting privileges—the subjects of the past two abortion-related Supreme Court cases—lawmakers recently have sought to impose gestational bans and to revisit the idea of when life begins. Those laws go straight at the question of whether, and at what point, abortions should be legal at all.

Changing the viability standard, the central holding in Roe, would not only upend the 1973 decision, it would also give states a green light to revisit dozens of other abortion laws that have been blocked over the years. “One of the basic principles of the rule of law is stare decisis,” says Rikelman. “You don’t change precedent unless there’s a really good reason, unless there’s been some really fundamental shift, a real change in facts, a major change in the law—and none of that has happened. For the court to reverse itself here for this right would just be deeply concerning for the rule of law.”

That’s exactly what this Mississippi case is asking the Supreme Court to do. In a brief this summer, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked the Court to overturn Roe, arguing that changes in science and society have rendered the precedent “decades out of date,” and that the controversy over Roe has damaged the Court. “The national fever on abortion can break only when this Court returns abortion policy to the States,” the brief said.

Rikelman and other abortion rights advocates disagree with that logic. If Roe were overturned, abortion would become illegal—either immediately or very quickly—in roughly half the states in the nation. The Center is currently litigating 32 cases and has clients in 25 states. Without the viability line, state legislatures would likely pass more laws restricting abortion and this work would multiply exponentially, Northup says, creating even more unequal access between conservative and liberal states. She notes that the Casey decision opens with the line “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” In other words, “the more imprecise the constitutional standard,” she says, “the more that opens the door for chaos and thus no refuge, no safety, no guarantee of liberty.”

Kathaleen Pittman, of Hope Medical Group for Women, Rikelman, senior director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy Northup, center president, and T.J. Tu, the center's senior council for U.S. litigation, stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court after oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo on March 4.

Kathaleen Pittman, of Hope Medical Group for Women, Rikelman, senior director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy Northup, center president, and T.J. Tu, the center’s senior council for U.S. litigation, stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court after oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo on March 4. Alyssa Schukar—Center for Reproductive Rights/AP

‘Always another road to go down’
Texas’s recent, ultra-strict abortion law represents a cautionary tale for the abortion rights movement. The law not only bans most abortions, but also deputizes private citizens to enforce the ban and gives them a bounty to do so. Some clinics in the state have stopped offering abortion services altogether, while the law has forced other abortion providers into tough legal corners. In the weeks since the law passed, Texans have flood surrounding states in search of abortions. “Texas has given us a preview of what we could see on a much bigger scale in many states around the country if Roe is overturned,” Rikelman says.

She knows that her ability to argue effectively before the Supreme Court in December comes with huge stakes. Women still make up only a fraction of advocates before the Supreme Court—often less than 20%—and now Rikelman will be appearing again in a case that could have historic implications for the future of how women are able to live in the U.S. She and her co-lead counsel Hillary Schneller often work 13- or 14-hour days preparing for oral arguments. By the time Dec. 1 comes, their team will have spent thousands of hours on the case.

The arguments themselves will look very different from the past. Due to the ongoing pandemic, only the main lawyers from each side and press will be allowed inside. Everyone else, including Northup, will have to wait outside. Rikelman isn’t even sure her husband will make it this time, as the family has been careful about traveling since their younger daughter isn’t yet eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Rikelman plans to listen to music—maybe some U2—to steady herself before the arguments and meditate on the extraordinary work that her clients do to keep their clinics open.

She and Northup are realistic about the outlook for their cause. The Supreme Court already allowed the Texas law to go into effect earlier this fall, and despite the Justices recently professing that they want to remain apolitical, the conservative Justices have all expressed clear opposition to abortion over the course of their careers.

“I have never been as concerned about the constitutional protections for abortion rights as I am today,” Northup says.But, she adds, she remains optimistic about the fight for abortion access going forward. “There’s always another road to go down,” Northup says. “If the Supreme Court slams the door, reverses Roe vs. Wade, we have the U.S. Congress, we have fighting state by state. We have mobilizing people, like perhaps had not been necessary before.”“There is always, always an opportunity to fight on a different front,” she adds. “And that’s what we’ll do.”

Source: https://time.com/6108402/julie-rikelman-supreme-court-abortion-rights/?fbclid=IwAR37cLvLM4vcXexlXrZMDWOWRYQF2_ujSy202Y3cegJt1eXOKHJcPm0okXE

When a Miscarriage Becomes a Jail Sentence
https://abortion-blog.com/2021/10/21/when-a-miscarriage-becomes-a-jail-sentence/

National Advocates for Pregnant Women painted a grim picture of pregnant people increasingly being prosecuted around the country for a miscarriage.

In January 2020, then-19-year-old Brittney Poolaw was pregnant and needed urgent medical care. She called 911 and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. She was having a miscarriage at 17 weeks.

Two months later, she was arrested and charged with first-degree manslaughter under Oklahoma law. Earlier this month—after spending 18 months in jail because she could not afford her $20,000 bond—Poolaw, now 21, was sentenced to four years in prison for her pregnancy loss. National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), which represents Poolaw, say this case is not an outlier—it’s one of over 1,000 such cases across the country in recent years.

The criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes—arresting, charging, and incarcerating pregnant people for miscarriages and stillbirths—might seem dystopian, like a plot point from a horror or sci-fi movie. Occasionally, cases like Poolaw’s make national headlines and are rightly judged as ghastly violations of human rights and autonomy. But that laser focus on individual cases can give the impression that these are isolated incidents.

They are not.

NAPW say cases like Poolaw’s have been on the rise in recent years. According to their analysis, from 1973 to 2005 there were at least 413 cases in which a woman’s pregnancy loss was a determinative factor in her loss of liberty. Since 2005 that number has tripled to over 1,200, indicating a rapid escalation of these types of arrests.

This is despite every major medical organization in the country opposing the use of the legal system to penalize pregnancy loss, and despite studies showing that criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes may actually deter pregnant people from seeking medical care, which in turn puts them and their pregnancies at greater risk.

Speaking to Rewire News Group, Dana Sussman, NAPW’s deputy executive director, and NAPW staff attorney Cassandra Kelly painted a grim picture of pregnant people increasingly being prosecuted for charges involving fetal demise. This is happening across the country, in states like Wisconsin, Alabama, and California; for the latter, they cited the cases of Chelsea Becker, who spent over a year incarcerated after being charged with murder for experiencing a stillbirth, and Adora Perez, who is serving an 11-year sentence for a similar charge.

An even more radical framework for criminalizing miscarriage
Describing Poolaw’s case, Sussman said, “I’m not sure if I have the words to describe frankly how problematic this case has been from start to finish.”

Prosecutors argued that Poolaw’s drug use was to blame for her pregnancy loss. When she sought medical attention for her miscarriage, she told hospital staff that she had used m**h and ma*****na. The medical examiner’s report listed maternal m**h use as a contributing factor to fetal demise, but didn’t determine it was directly responsible. And even an OB-GYN testifying for the prosecution said that while drug use can have an effect on pregnancy, it’s unclear what caused the miscarriage in this case.

Under Oklahoma law, manslaughter and murder laws can be applied to a viable fetus, as can child abuse and neglect laws. But Poolaw’s miscarriage occured when she was 17 weeks pregnant, long before a fetus reaches viability. NAPW advocates say Poolaw’s case is one of the earliest they’ve seen; by prosecuting a pre-viability miscarriage as manslaughter, Oklahoma prosecutors are pushing the law’s bounds, indicating a shift toward an even more radical framework for criminalizing pregnancy loss.

NAPW is a nonprofit organization that does pro bono criminal defense, advocacy, public education, and organizing around the criminalization of pregnancy loss.

The particulars of Poolaw’s case are a web of legal b***y traps. “There has to be a causal link when we’re talking about manslaughter,” Sussman said. “In Brittney’s case, it was ‘possession of an illegal substance.’ Of course, possession on its own, even by their framing, wouldn’t cause fetal demise. It’s the consumption, but in Oklahoma, from what we understand, possession has essentially been construed as also covering consumption.”

What we see happening with the criminalization of pregnancy loss is not unlike what we see with the increasingly volatile state of abortion access in the country. Lawmakers and prosecutors start by encroaching on the bodily autonomy of pregnant people in a way they know will be most palatable to society. They target circumstances most fraught with stigma and taboo: later abortion bans, restrictions on young people accessing abortion, criminalization of drug use during pregnancy. But Sussman says they will not stop there.

It comes down to prosecutors claiming the pregnant person put the fetus at “risk of harm,” she said, a measure of liability with drastic potential for expansion.

“We’ve tracked all cases that we can find in which someone has been arrested and/or prosecuted or experienced another deprivation of liberty in relation to their pregnancy, and the vast majority of those cases involve drug use,” Sussman said. “It’s not all though. So, we do see cases where someone fell down a flight of stairs and was charged with some criminal allegation creating a risk of harm to the fetus.”

But NAPW wants to make clear that pushing back against the criminalization of pregnancy loss isn’t about viability or substance use; pointing out these legal intricacies is not to concede that viability or the pregnant person’s behavior should be used to determine whether manslaughter or other criminal charges are appropriate.

Instead, NAPW staff stress that the criminalization of any pregnancy loss is wrong. If lawmakers and prosecutors intended to stop with cases involving post-viability pregnancies, or miscarriages involving allegations of drug use, that would still warrant the abject horror that Poolaw’s case has been greeted with.

“It is a slippery slope. We are on the slope.”
A critical part of this case is Poolaw’s Indigenous background—she is a member of Comanche Nation; the history of the criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes is, unsurprisingly, deeply rooted in racism and classism.

“So much of this has its tentacles in the ‘crack baby’ obsession in the ‘80s and ‘90s targeting poor Black women,” Sussman said. She cites a 1989 policy in which the Medical University of South Carolina entered into an agreement with local law enforcement to surreptitiously drug test and report pregnant women, so that police could arrest them days and sometimes just hours after giving birth. The population that the hospital was serving at the time was predominantly Black and lower income.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenged the policy in court:

Some women were taken to jail while still bleeding from giving birth. Others were arrested and jailed while they were pregnant, even though the prison could not provide prenatal care or drug treatment. When the incarcerated women went into labor, they were returned to the hospital in shackles. One woman was handcuffed to her bed throughout her delivery.

The Supreme Court heard the Center’s challenge to the policy and, in 2001, ruled in their favor. But the same type of disparate impact remains the reality of criminalized adverse pregnancy outcomes today. Sussman stresses that cases like Poolaw’s will affect marginalized pregnant people most—Black, trans and nonbinary, disabled, undocumented, and lower income pregnant people are all at an increased risk of having their pregnancy losses criminalized.

“We all know that pregnancy is grossly understudied and there’s so much still unknown,” Sussman says. “Exercising too vigorously, going downhill skiing, a lot of things [involve risk], but because of the war on drugs and because of racism and because of classism and lots of other things, the focus has been disproportionately on drug use. But it is a slippery slope. We are on the slope.”

Criminalization of pregnancy loss is rapidly expanding in scope, in ways that continue to target marginalized people. Sussman said NAPW is now seeing cases where a pregnant person faces allegations of lack of prenatal care as part of a larger charge. This is particularly insidious considering which communities lack access to proper prenatal care, and the fact that for low-income families, accessing prenatal care means interacting with a state system that has the potential to surveil them, which in turn leaves them vulnerable to prosecution if they experience pregnancy loss. NAPW is even starting to see cases where parents of newborns become ensnared in the legal system for allegations of drug use during breastfeeding.

Poolaw’s case forewarns of a system where all pregnancies that do not end in a live birth can be deemed suspicious. As Texas SB 8, which bans nearly all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, dominates headlines, it’s critical to understand how criminalizing abortion and criminalizing pregnancy loss intersect. Conservatives in Texas have been quick to assure voters that pregnant people themselves cannot be charged under the anti-abortion law, but the reality is that pregnant people around the country are already being charged for not carrying a pregnancy to term. And while medication abortion is safe and effective, an increased demand for it presents unique challenges to populations of pregnant people who are more likely to have their pregnancy losses criminalized.

The increasing criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes also speaks to a deep-seated stigma and taboo surrounding miscarriage and infertility.

“It’s premised on this false notion that everyone can guarantee a healthy pregnancy and that it is somehow your failure, your incapacity, your fault, som**hing you did or som**hing you didn’t do, that caused the pregnancy loss,” Sussman said.

“We of course know how common pregnancy loss is and how it’s been really sort of understudied, as so many sort of health issues that predominantly affect women are, and thinking about sort of all of the economic, social, structural reasons why people might experience pregnancy loss … And yet here we are holding women criminally liable when they can’t guarantee a healthy pregnancy.”

Sussman said Poolaw now has a short window of time to decide whether to appeal. Four years is the minimum sentence for manslaughter in Oklahoma, and she could have gotten life in prison, Sussman said.

“I think she has been through a deeply, deeply traumatic experience,” Sussman said. “It’s trauma layered upon trauma. And so we’re going to be driven by what she wants. But regardless of what decision she makes, it’s not the end of our fight in Oklahoma because more cases are coming.”

Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/10/21/when-a-miscarriage-becomes-a-jail-sentence/?fbclid=IwAR1sd5-W00x9cdVxOAlOS1Izh18IpqdFY9KYIIAAw-jTLefg9vhTaigC_Ew