I stand by my choices and honor the choices of others.
I didn't want to write a book about miscarriages, terminations, adoptions, trafficked bodies, and pregnancy-- but I could not stop. The stories kept coming.
My home state of Alabama is a hub for gun rights, recreational violence, and misogynistic billboards that strip the personhood of women. It comes as no surprise:
Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.
Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.
A female body is punished for failure to make her body a good house. Meanwhile, in Alabama and all across this country, corporations secure more rights to dump and damage the environment, to poison the groundwater that causes birth defects and countless cancers, to get away with mangling fetuses and sickening children leaving citizens powerless. Power-less. Unable to stop them.
Why are the crimes of the rich being leveraged against the bodies of the poor?
Why should anyone pledge their allegiance to a flag that represents the reign of bad stewardship and lack of corporate accountability?
National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s one-of-a-kind study identifies hundreds of criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 and 2005, after the decision in Roe v. Wade was issued. In each of the 413 cases, pregnancy was a necessary element and the consequences included: arrests; incarceration; increases in prison or jail sentences; detentions in hospitals, mental institutions and drug treatment programs; and forced medical interventions, including surgery. Data showed that state authorities have used post-Roe measures including feticide laws and anti-abortion laws recognizing separate rights for fertilized, eggs, embryos and fetuses as the basis for depriving pregnant women – whether they were seeking to end a pregnancy or go to term – of their physical liberty. The findings make clear that if so called “personhood” measures are enacted, not only will more women who have abortions be arrested, such measures would create the legal basis for depriving all pregnant women of their status as full persons under the law.
The study found in a majority of cases, no adverse pregnancy outcome was reported and that where an adverse outcome was alleged, state authorities were typically not required to provide expert testimony or scientific evidence to prove that the pregnant woman’s actions, inactions, or circumstances would or in fact did cause the alleged harm.
The study documented cases in which fear of arrests and forced interventions deterred women from seeking help for themselves and in some cases for their newborns. These findings are consistent with the medical and public health consensus that punitive measures, and the legal arguments supporting them, will undermine rather than further state interests in child, fetal, and maternal health.
This study found that far from protecting patient privacy and confidentiality, professionals in the health care system were often the people gathering information from pregnant women and new mothers and disclosing it to police, prosecutors, and court officials.
National Advocates for Pregnant Women
I am a mother like any other shuffling between head lice and heart ache. Nothing about this choice is easy or predetermined. Every step we take is a gift and a source of wonder.
If you'd like to hear voices tied to wombs, consider picking up a copy of Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus, my hybrid poetry collection published by Finishing Line Press.
Love, always, Alina.
