20 Years in Prison for Pooping Too Hard

A:  "Feticide" is not a crime.  It is not even a thing. You cannot "kill" a piece of your own body. Getting rid of the equivalent of a tumor is not a crime.

B.  Abortion is not a crime either.  It is a federally-protected legal procedure.  It is no more a crime if you do it yourself than if you sew up a cut on your own hand.

C. Nuke Indiana.  Do it now.

Michelle Goldberg at The Nation:

Indiana’s law allowing discrimination against gay people is not the only reason that the state deserves our opprobrium. It’s also about to become the first state to imprison a woman for what it says is the death of a baby born after an attempted abortion.

On Monday, 33-year-old Purvi Patel, an unmarried woman from a conservative Hindu family who bought abortion drugs online, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the crimes of feticide and neglect of a dependent. It was not the first time that feticide laws, passed under the guise of protecting pregnant women from attack, have been turned against pregnant women themselves. Indiana, after all, was also the state that jailed Bei Bei Shuai, an immigrant who tried to commit suicide by poisoning herself while pregnant, and whose baby later died. But the Patel case is still a disturbing landmark. “Yes, the feticide laws in other states have been used to arrest and sometimes punish the pregnant women herself,” says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which advised Patel’s defense. “This is the first time it’s being used to punish what they say is an attempted self-abortion.”