A pregnant woman is shot in the stomach and miscarries. Can the baby’s mother be charged with the fetus’s death?
This sounds like a law exam question I might have posed to my students to encourage critical thinking about law, politics, ethics, and morality. But when I read the story of Marshae Jones, a young woman of color in Alabama, being charged with manslaughter after losing her pregnancy when another woman shot her in the stomach, all my critical thinking went out the window and was replaced with outrage.
According to news accounts, Jones and another woman were quarreling in a parking lot in Pleasant Grove, Alabama, last December before Jones was shot. Police initially arrested the shooter for manslaughter, but a grand jury failed to indict her.
Six months later, in late June, Jones herself was indicted by the grand jury for manslaughter.
The police laid the blame squarely on Jones because they said she started the fight that led to the shooting. Lt. Danny Reid of the Pleasant Grove Police Department declared that the only “true victim” was “the unborn baby.”
He could not have been more wrong.
Aside from the obvious physical harm done to Jones by the shooting itself and the loss of her baby, Jones is a victim of Alabama law, which holds that life begins at conception. Last May, Alabama’s legislature and governor banned nearly all abortions in the state at any stage of a pregnancy unless the mother’s physical or mental health is in jeopardy. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Alabama is one of thirty-eight states that have fetal homicide laws allowing criminal charges when fetuses are killed in violent acts.
It is not unheard of for women to be prosecuted for the deaths of their fetuses as the result of a tragic circumstance, like a car accident or a drug overdose. Often those women are poor or troubled and depicted as irresponsible and selfish. According to an investigation by ProPublica and AL.com, in Alabama, hundreds of women have been prosecuted for exposing their fetuses to controlled substances under a 2006 “chemical endangerment” law.
In Pleasant Grove, a city of 10,000 people on the western outskirts of Birmingham where Jones lives, three other women who were addicted to drugs were prosecuted for chemical endangerment in recent years.
With the right-leaning Supreme Court primed to overturn a woman’s right to choose abortion, we are seeing increasingly draconian tactics used to punish women. But prosecuting a woman whose pregnancy is terminated by an assailant pushes the outer limits of even fundamentalist reasoning. In a statement, Planned Parenthood decried the case as the “criminalization of black women” and the refusal to give them justice.
Prosecuting a woman whose pregnancy is terminated by an assailant pushes the outer limits of even fundamentalist reasoning.
“As a black woman, despite being physically harmed and losing her pregnancy, the state does not recognize Marshae as a victim only her fetus,” the statement said. With Alabama’s recent abortion ban, we will continue to see people of color being charged for their reproductive decisions and outcomes.
Marshae Jones thought of her unborn child as her baby. She named her Marlaysia Jones and keeps her ashes in an urn. The idea that once a woman is carrying a child she ceases to be a person herself and becomes only an incubator, perverts all notions of decency and humanity.
In this case, the public outcry was enough to turn the tide. On July 3, a week in advance of a scheduled hearing, the Jefferson County district attorney’s office dropped the charges against Marshae Jones.
But nothing can undo the harm that the state of Alabama has already done to Jones. And what has happened here portends an uncertain future for women’s reproductive rights throughout the nation.
This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.