Dear Governor Pence and Judge Hurley,
I am sure it must be very satisfying for you, Governor Pence, and for your prosecutors to have achieved the conviction of Purvi Patel; and for you, Judge Hurley, to impose on her such a long sentence. And you were able to convict her not only of feticide, but of child neglect. Some people may say that is illogical and contradictory, but I think that shows some very creative thinking.
I do wonder if you have considered the long-term consequences of this creative thinking. Does it matter to you if other women are discouraged from seeking medical aid if they self-abort? Or if women are discouraged from seeking prenatal care for fear their doctor could report them if they simply miscarry, or suffer a stillbirth when a home birth goes wrong? Does it matter to you if these women die? Maybe not. But I’m sure it must matter to you if their babies die, and I think that because of the Purvi Patel trial more babies will die. If your objective in making an example of Ms. Patel was truly to save babies’ lives, then I think you will fail to achieve it.
If the goal is to save babies’ lives, I don’t think draconian punishments are the answer. I think of Aesop’s fable of the wind and the sun: surely the sun shining on pregnant women, gently encouraging them to give birth by providing things like easier access to health care — something red states like yours don’t seem very interested in — is more effective than the howling winds of law enforcement.
But another consequence of the Patel trial, a more personal, less far-reaching consequence, is that it has completely destroyed any respect I had remaining for the pro-life cause.
I used to be pro-life. As a young pro-life advocate, my Bible was the Handbook on Abortion by John and Barbara Willke, early leaders in the pro-life movement. The Willkes assured me that in the good old days when abortion was illegal in this country, women seeking abortions were never prosecuted, only abortionists.
I believed the Willkes, and that was important to me. It allowed me to pursue the pro-life cause with zeal. I couldn’t have otherwise. Maybe it’s a weakness on my part, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of a pregnant woman who might be alone, poor, scared, and desperate being sent to jail. Even if she wasn’t any of those things, the thought of prosecutors taking time and money in court to prove that she wasn’t, and therefore deserved punishment – that just seemed ridiculous. It seemed like the government should have better things to do.
But it seems very clear, not only from Ms. Patel’s conviction and sentencing, but from the reaction of pro-life organizations around the country – which is either vocal support of the sentencing, or silence about it – that today’s anti-abortion advocates are more than OK with punishing a woman for the death of her unborn child.
I don’t remember my gentle friends in my college pro-life group being this way. But it seems that there are not enough of us around, those of us who think abortion is wrong but don’t believe in punishing women for aborting, to make any difference.
Therefore, I can’t support the pro-life cause anymore, even when it attempts to pass the mildest restrictions on abortion, because I know that women who violate these restrictions will be punished. I cannot raise my four children to support the pro-life cause; and I intend to speak out, and to encourage my children and others to speak out, against anti-abortion legislation, because I don’t see it as “pro-life” anymore. Not when you are sending a woman to jail for decades because – because you can. Because she is poor and isolated and from a different culture, like Bei Bei Shuai, the last person you managed to jail under the feticide law. Because her emotional reaction to her miscarriage, or abortion, whichever it was – and I am far from convinced that abortion is what it was – was not one that our culture approves of. Never mind that we have no way in Sex and the City- and Girls- watching, 21st-century America of understanding the tremendous cultural pressures on a woman from Purvi’s cultural background who conceives out of wedlock, and how the shame and fear she feels might easily cancel out any sort of emotional attachment she might feel to an unborn child.
If Purvi had been white and middle-class, there would have been greater public sympathy for her. You knew this, and you chose to take advantage of it. Purvi Patel and Bei Bei Shuai were stand-ins for all the American citizens who abort, all the women you can’t punish (at least not right now) because of Roe v. Wade.
When your state’s feticide law was passed, its supporters pooh-poohed the concerns of abortion rights advocates that it might be used against pregnant women. But now it has been. It’s painfully clear to me now that you don’t want to go back to the “good old days” when only abortionists were prosecuted; you want to go back even farther than that. Maybe to days that never even existed in the United States but exist still in some “traditional” cultures – like that of Saudi Arabia, for example, whose laws you supposedly deplore.
But I thank you, and I thank National Right to Life, and “Feminists” for Life, whom I fervently believed in when I was young and naïve, and the Susan B. Anthony List, for finally disillusioning me – you by your actions, and they by their silence. At last you all have made your intentions so clear that even I, who for so long was willing to see them in the best possible light, can no longer misinterpret them.
The Quondam Ultramontanist 