Ambivalence about motherhood: a criminal act?

This case from Iowa is a spine-tingling example of the ways that feticide laws, ostensibly created to protect pregnant women and punish late-term abortion, can go awry. Police accused Christine Taylor, an Iowa mother of two, of trying to kill her fetus when she fell down the stairs. According to Ms. Taylor, she was crying and hyperventilating after a distressing conversation with her estranged huband, and fell down a flight of stairs. Although paramedics said she was fine, she went to the emergency room out of concern for her fetus. While there, she admitted to hospital personnel that she had not wanted to be pregnant and had considered adoption and abortion rather than raising a third child as a single mother.

Read this slowly: she was arrested and jailed for being ambivalent about her pregnancy.

Before anyone starts wanking about “no, she was jailed for trying to illegally kill her baybee!!,” I’d like to point out that the police never would have been involved had she not expressed her ambivalence at being pregnant. You know, because having a miscarriage is not a crime.

Most feticide laws do not apply to a pregnant woman’s conduct in
relation to her own fetus. This is not the case in Iowa. As it stands,
Iowa Code § 707.7 applies only in the third trimester:

1. “Any person who intentionally terminates a human pregnancy, with
the knowledge and voluntary consent of the pregnant person, after the
end of the second trimester of the pregnancy where death of the fetus
results commits feticide.”

2. “Any person who attempts to intentionally terminate a human
pregnancy, with the knowledge and voluntary consent of the pregnant
person, after the end of the second trimester of the pregnancy where
death of the fetus does not result commits attempted feticide.”

3. “Any person who terminates a human pregnancy, with the knowledge
and voluntary consent of the pregnant person, who is not a person
licensed to practice medicine and surgery or osteopathic medicine and
surgery under the provisions of Chapter 148, commits a Class C felony.”

Iowa recently avoided extending this law to all pregnant women when the governor vetoed an Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

As though it weren’t bad enough as it is, a law professor brings up
the fact that the police never should have been able to get a statement
made by a patient to medical personnel during the course of treatment,
especially not evidence used to prove a propensity toward a certain
type of criminal act.  Such evidence would be considered inadmissible
under federal rules.

It appears that the hospital may have tried to hide behind mandatory
reporter status, although it’s worth noting that there was no “child”
here for legal purposes. In fact, most jurisdictions do not extend
juvenile court jurisdiction to fetuses. It is a little hard to glean
the chain of events from the article, but it seems as though a nurse
reported Ms. Taylor to the police, saying that she was in her third
trimester when she was actually in her second. The police came to the
hospital and interrogated Ms. Taylor. According to the article:

Shortly after she was released from the hospital, two squad cars
pulled up behind the taxi she was in on her way home to meet her two
girls. She said she spent two days in jail, while her daughters
wondered where she was.

Police indicated in their report that they would notify child
protective services. Typically, it seems, protocol is to report
suspected child abuse to the agency, which does not
intervene before a child is born. Nevertheless, such an investigation
could conceivably interfere with her right to custody of her other two
children.

Fortunately, no formal charges will be brought, but it seems that
this is only because her doctor confirmed that she was in her second
trimester rather than because such charges would be completely inane
and would call every stillbirth into question.  Unfortunately, however,
untold reputational damage has already been done.  It seems that even
when the criminal justice system determines that they don’t have a case
against a woman, the court of public opinion is harsher, as evidenced
by headlines such as “No Charges in Attempted Fetus Death.”

Cases like this are highly troubling to me because they reinforce,
on pain of criminal prosecution, the idea that a woman carrying a
pregnancy to term must be immediately and unequivocally happy about the
prospect of motherhood. Like parents scolding a toddler, the state says
“you’ll carry that fetus and you’ll like it, goddamit, or I’ll really give you something to cry about.”