Women aren't safe anywhere right-wing DAs rule— even in the bluest states
Tough-on-crime hysteria has planted right-wing DAs all over the country.
Since Roe v Wade, more than 1,700 women have been arrested, prosecuted or forced into medical treatment because of their pregnancy status or outcome, according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW).
Prosecutors have used an array of tactics, like drug delivery to minor children (through the umbilical court). Assault with a deadly weapon (cocaine). Women have been charged with homicide or feticide in cases when the fetus died during birth if the autopsy revealed any trace of substances (despite no evidence that drug use leads to infant death), according to a paper by the Center for Reproductive Rights.
21-hear-old Brittney Poolaw had a miscarriage. When she went to the hospital, she admitted to using drugs. She was arrested and charged with first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Women have been prosecuted for self-induced abortions. In 2016, a Tennessee women who tried to abort her fetus with a coat-hanger was charged with attempted murder, and spent a year in jail before she pled guilty to a lesser charge.
Now, prosecutors will be more emboldened than ever. “Without the protections granted by Roe v. Wade, which was never enough, this criminalization will only increase,” NAPW writes.
There are states so overwhelmingly blue that when a Republican runs for office they switch to Democrat (Mall king Rick Caruso in California) or independent (Michael Bloomberg in New York). But decades of crime hysteria have led to deeply conservative DAs all over the country.
For example.
Michael Hestrin, the district attorney of Riverside, California, prides himself for being “tough-on-crime.” "The community has to see us as tough and aggressive,” he said in 2018.
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