America Is A Bad Country

America Is A Bad Country

I was drinking some water when I clicked on this news article link and I have to say that my jaw utterly dropped and my eyes went wide when I read just a paragraph of this news piece.

In short, I know we just celebrated how America is awesome with explosions and what not, but this just takes the cake on how much some of our states are just backwards as hell.. Women need to prove they didn't kill something with a miscarriage....

This year, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would require women to prove their miscarriages “occurred naturally” and weren’t secret abortions. In a similar vein, the Guardian reports that states including Mississippi and Alabama are charging dozens of women with murder or other serious crimes who have miscarried or had stillbirths:

Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.[...]

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes. Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way.[...]

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth. Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with “chemical endangerment” of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

“That shocked me, it really did,” Kimbrough said. “I had lost a child, that was enough.”

Kimbrough is now facing a 10-year sentence if her case is not reversed on appeal — a 10 year sentence that will deprive her three other children of their mother.

A common tactic by prosecutors is singling out a group of women who are unlikely to draw public sympathy — women who may have used drugs while pregnant — to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs, for example, was 15 when she became pregnant and lost her baby in a stillbirth. Prosecutors charged her with a “depraved heart murder” after they discovered she had used cocaine, although there was “no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death.” She now faces life in prison in Mississippi

God fucking damn, America. But hey, don't do the crime if you can't do the time, am I right? Maybe this is something more than another 40k a year from the public coffers to punish an impoverished uneducated minority - Women.

Oh, did I mention that Rennie Gibbs is black yet? Because that was sort of a given that Rennie Gibbs ended up being black. I mean, it wouldn't be a "Fuck America" sort of story if a black person wasn't getting the shit end of the stick.

How does one even get to be a prosecutor in something like this? Do you literally and unironically have to be an old testament bible thumping life hating dumb and worthless shit for brains to have any position of authority in this fucking country?

Try to convince me, because I'm seeing very limited evidence to suggest otherwise.

And to top it off, the fact that the U.S. has the gall to criticize the human rights situations of China, Iran, Afghanistan, or literally anywhere else in the world is nothing short of a travesty. I mean, just look at this part of the article again;

Kimbrough is now facing a 10-year sentence if her case is not reversed on appeal — a 10 year sentence that will deprive her three other children of their mother.

That has got to be my favorite part of this whole shit. You punish a mother into a 10 year sentence for miscarrying her child and denying it from life itself.. by taking away her chance to be a mother to her already born children? Way to miss the whole point.

But hey, maybe once they're actually children, it's all personal responsibility.

What's worse is that this is legislation that puts the burden explicitly on the defendant. How exactly is this in anyway constitutional even un the current supreme court travesty?

Oh wait, I'm sure the answer to that will come in a 5-4 decision...