- Lawyer Samantha Lee represents a woman accused of murder after her stillborn child tested positive for drugs.
- Chelsea Becker, who is struggling with addiction during her pregnancy, was released from prison after 16 months.
- Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle that he expected such a persecution for miscarriages “only to get worse.”
Loading Something is loading.
The lawyer, who represented a California woman accused of murder after her stillborn baby tested positive for drugs, said cases such as her clients’ would “get worse” amid national repression of reproductive rights.
Chelsea Becker, who struggled with addiction during her pregnancy, has faced charges of murder in Kings County after suffering a stillbirth in 2019, which the prosecutor blamed for drug use. Although she failed to raise the $ 2 million needed to bail and spent 16 months in prison, the charges were eventually dropped and she was released in 2021.
Becker’s lawyer, Lee herself of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the San Francisco Chronicle that her client’s case – and a similar case in 2018 – is part of a growing national trend to criminalize pregnant women after stillbirth and miscarriage. .
“When that door opens, then anything someone does or doesn’t do during their pregnancy can be charged in a similar way,” Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We already see it and expect it to only get worse.”
National Advocates for Pregnant Women found that prosecutions against pregnant women tripled between 2006 and 2020, compared with cases between 1973 and 2005. As the Supreme Court appears ready to overturn Rowe’s defense against Wade after the expiration. According to a draft court opinion, several countries have laws that make abortion a crime.
Becker, who had a second child who was placed in foster care and adopted before she was released from prison, has since become an advocate for a bill in California that would stop criminalizing the loss of pregnancy.
“I hope that in the future no woman will ever be tried for losing her pregnancy,” she wrote in a letter to state deputies.
Add Comment