personhood1

Why Does This 15-Year-Old Girl Face Life in Prison for a Miscarriage?

Rennie Gibbs became pregnant at the age of 15 and subsequently lost the baby when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy in December of 2006. Stillborn, it was. Prosecutors in Mississippi discovered she had a cocaine habit and charged the girl under the 130-year-old “depraved-heart murder” statute — which is filed when someone is suspected of placing another person in imminent danger of death.

If convicted of the death of her child under this law, Gibbs faces a mandatory life sentence in the state.

As several outlets have pointed out, Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. The case was argued before the Mississippi State Supreme Court way back on May 25, so currently, we’re just awaiting a decision over Gibbs’ fate. Their decision could have huge ramifications for the rest of the country.

According to one blogger, “It appears from the MSSC docket that the district attorney was the perennially loathsome Forrest Allgood. Even back in 2007, journalist Radley Balko said it was “rather chilling to think about how many people this guy has wrongly put in prison.”

Right off the bat, that should raise a red flag as to what is going on here. Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.

“If it’s not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is,” said Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer who argued the case on behalf of Gibbs. “I hope it’s not a trend that’s going to catch on. To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme.”

The tactic of prosecuting an unsympathetic woman is a purposeful one to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs is just one part of the larger puzzle on the new assault against abortion. Since anti-choice opponents have come to realize they won’t have much success over-turning Roe vs. Wade entirely, they have attempted to chip away at it with minor encroachments like the de-funding of Planned Parenthood or by prosecuting miscarriages so that eventually pregnancy termination procedures will be so expensive and difficult to do properly that it effectively becomes banned.

It is a remarkably sly tactic that has produced detrimental results for something that is still a constitutionally protected right.

According to Think Progress:

At least 38 states have introduced fetal homicide laws that were intended to be used against violent attacks by third parties like abusive male partners. But in South Carolina, only one case has been brought against a man for assaulting a pregnant woman, while up to 300 women have been arrested under the law, according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

These prosecutions are part of a much broader assault on women’s reproductive rights. Indeed, it’s been a banner year for the right’s war on women, with state legislatures passing a slew of restrictive legislation across the country that not only impede women’s constitutional right to abortions but also jeopardize their access to basic health care. Four states have defunded Planned Parenthood so far, a new Ohio law bans abortions as early as six weeks without exceptions for rape or incest, and Texas is one of several states that now forces women seeking abortions to undergo waiting periods and mandatory sonograms. Some groups and lawmakers are even pushing to outlaw contraceptives like birth control pills.

Studies have shown that abortion rates have remained fairly steady whether the medical procedure is legal or not, suggesting in part that making it illegal does little to deter women from having one. Yes, abortion is a political can of worms, especially in America. But at the end of the day the outlawing of the serious medical procedure could potentially be more harmful.

No woman takes the decision to terminate her pregnancy lightly, and Planned Parenthood would be the first to say its intention would be to make abortion safe, legal and a last resort.

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Comments (25) Write a comment

  1. If this was Kansas, this girl would have already been murdered by residents. This is a frightening case that could have terrible ramifications for the rest of the country if this goes the wrong way.

  2. If your going to abort the baby abort it. dont poison the baby with cocaine for the entire term good riddance.

  3. If your going to abort the baby abort it. dont poison the baby with cocaine for the entire term good riddance.

  5. Pingback: Fuming « gerundsforliving

  6. “anti-choice opponents”

    I think you contradicted yourself by trying to stretch your insult vocabulary a little far. The double negative means you are saying these people are against not having a choice – which from the text is clearly not what you mean.

  7. Anti = one that is opposed. Anti choice, one who is opposed to the right to choose.

  8. How about toxic waste provided by local industry? If they affect the rates of miscarriages and stillborns, do the companies pay a fine, or does someone (CEO, BOD, Management)go to prison for murder? Corporations are people. The Supreme Court told us so. Or is it that businesses are people only for the advantageous rights and not for the liabilities of people?

  9. now im against the idea of abortion for my own reasons BUT
    i would not deny someone else having the right to do with thier own body
    what someone else does is thier buisness and only thier buisness

    the right wing who presses this anti abortion crap really should read thier own bible
    for its actually in the bible that GOD approves of Abortion even commands men to force women to have abortions

    ” Hosea 9:11-16 Hosea prays for God’s intervention. “Ephraim shall bring forth his children to the murderer. Give them, 0 Lord: what wilt thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. . .Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit: yea though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb.” Clearly Hosea desires that the people of Ephraim can no longer have children. God of course obeys by making all their unborn children miscarry. Is not terminating a pregnancy unnaturally “abortion”?

    Numbers 5:11-21 The description of a bizarre, brutal and abusive ritual to be performed on a wife SUSPECTED of adultery. This is considered to be an induced abortion to rid a woman of another man’s child.

    Numbers 31:17 (Moses) “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every women that hath known man by lying with him.” In other words: women that might be pregnant, which clearly is abortion for the fetus.

    Hosea 13:16 God promises to dash to pieces the infants of Samaria and the “their women with child shall be ripped up”. Once again this god kills the unborn, including their pregnant mothers.

    2 Kings 15:16 God allows the pregnant women of Tappuah (aka Tiphsah) to be “ripped open”. And the Christians have the audacity to say god is pro-life. How and the hell is it that Christians can read passages where God allows pregnant women to be murdered, yet still claim abortion is wrong?”

  13. Ok I am by NO means religious at all and I do believe that everyone has the right to do with what they will with their own body. If you want to have an abortion it’s your chose, if you don’t believe in it then don’t do it. People need to learn that this is American, Land of the Free, and we have rights to do whatever we want with our bodies. Now, having said that this girl should not be charged with murder. If you have a choice to kill your baby under your own authority then why is this any different. If anything she should be charged with using a illegal drug. It has been said that she HAS HAD a cocaine problem, meaning she had one before she got pregnant. She had to have known that it wouldn’t be good for the baby but still that is her choice to keep using. Being a nurse, I know for a fact their are atleast 25 women that come in a day having babies addicted to cocaine….sorry to pay devil’s advocate but this baby is lucky not to have been born to a coke-head, teenage mother!! Just saying!

  15. Isn’t it a shame that Prosecutors in Mississippi are more concerned with the unborn than the poor child that had a drug problem and got pregnant when only 15 years old. Is that poor 15 year old child not important? Where is the compassion? Why didn’t the state try to help her? I think it is reasonable to think that there was a lot lacking in her home life. District Attorney Allgood (now there’s an misnomer) should be hounded from office he is a disgrace.

  16. Thanks Penelope. Yeah I definitely should have watched my double negatives. I guess I could just have used “pro-life” and been done with it, but I prefer the notion of referring to the anti-abortion crowd as anti-choice.

  17. Pingback: Woman Faces Faces Life In Prison For Miscarriage She Had At 15 « Alan Colmes' Liberaland

  19. Wow, Mississippi fail. Of all the things that could’ve probably USED attention from the legal system, someone selects a miscarriage that happened back in 2006? Waste of time, waste of resources, AND now you’re forcing this girl to relive a past she’d probably like to forget – and that’s assuming that anyone helped her get clean and into a better situation than the one she was in to begin with.

  20. I’d like to see them prove that the fetus was a human being to begin with. What defines anything as a human being? At what point do we deem someone a “person” that can be murdered? Who makes that decision?

  21. Thank you all for your vivid example of how grotesquely cavalier this country has become about life. Whenever you read about some gross injustice done to another form now on and wonder how this could happen, look in the mirror. When anyone shows a callous disregard for life, civilized society has a duty to react. A murder charge for the girl is ridiculous, but reckless endangerment is perfectly applicable and should be. You would deny the most helpless among us the basic right to life just so you can feel enlightened among your fellow douchebags. Congratulations.

  22. If you were going for the moral highground here, it didn’t work. God says it’s okay to perform genocide on the people of Ephiram, so abortion is cool? What? And I’m an evil pro-choice skanky female, so.

    “” Hosea 9:11-16 Hosea prays for God’s intervention. “Ephraim shall bring forth his children to the murderer. Give them, 0 Lord: what wilt thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. . .Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit: yea though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb.” Clearly Hosea desires that the people of Ephraim can no longer have children. God of course obeys by making all their unborn children miscarry. Is not terminating a pregnancy unnaturally “abortion”?”

  24. you can’t be charged for using drugs. If that were the case, the jails would be even more over crowded with non-violent offenders. As it stands, this whole farce of a war on drugs is useless.

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