Moralists' new target: pregnant women

[KG]

http://www.stpetersburgtimes.com/2003/08/10/Columns/Moralists__new_target.shtml

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 10, 2003


When Regina McKnight delivered a stillborn baby in May 1999 after 81/2 months of pregnancy she did what many other mothers who lose a baby do: She grieved. McKnight named the dead infant Mercedes and asked to hold it. She wanted photographs and the baby's footprints as a remembrance and she sought the hospital chaplain.

With an estimated 28,000 women a year suffering a stillborn delivery, McKnight's situation was hardly unique. Except for one thing: McKnight was arrested for it.

McKnight, who is poor, black, and has an IQ of 72, was charged with "homicide by child abuse" for smoking crack cocaine during a pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth. After two trials in Horry County, S.C., McKnight, then 24 years old and a mother of three with no prior criminal record, was sentenced to 12 years in prison with no chance at parole.

South Carolina should change its license plate motto from "Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places" to the far more apt "Antepartum Police State." The state has tried persistently and for years to make women criminally liable for their pregnancies. More specifically, Charlie Condon, the state's former attorney general who is running for U.S. Senate, has been the architect of the state's attempts to punish pregnant women. He helped to formulate a program of drug testing pregnant women at a Charleston public hospital that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001.

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[scarletlib]

1. Excellent Article

This article tells it the way it is. Let's face it, one of the objectives of the ultra right is the absolute abrogation of any rights for women. Why they hate and fear us so I will never understand.

Anyone who believes in human rights and all women should be fighting these policies tooth and nail.

Personally, I think that patriarchy has ruled this planet far too long. It (patriarchy) has always been based on war, domination,power of the few, cruelty to the entire human species and earth. It's time the women took back the planet.

[alarimer]

2. SC

Another place I would never want to live. Along with Alabama and Mississippi...