Purvi Patel sentenced to 20 years in abortion case in Indiana

In a case that attracted national attention, an Indiana judge has sentenced 33-year-old Purvi Patel to what effectively amounts to 20 years in prison for feticide and neglect of a dependent.

Patel of Granger was earlier found guilty of felony child neglect and feticide charges.

Indiana has some of the harshest restrictions on abortion in the country. Women activists stood by her side right from the beginning of the case last year.

She was convicted of using abortion drugs she bought online from Hong Kong without a prescription to terminate a pregnancy caused by a married Hispanic man.

After the verdict, she was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and was immediately remanded to St. Georges County Jail, but will likely serve out her sentence in Indiana Women’s Prison.

She was sentenced six years for feticide and 30 years on the charge of neglecting a child: she will be allowed to serve the two sentences concurrently. Patel is mandated to serve 20 years in prison and will then serve a 10-year suspended sentence. Patel has 30 days to appeal her sentence.

Patel faced Class A felony of neglect charges after police said that she took drugs to terminate her pregnancy, and then left the baby in a dumpster near a restaurant owned by the family. Later the prosecutor added feticide charge on top of neglect which the judge allowed.

“The charges are unfortunate and I don’t agree with them,” Patel's lawyer, Jeff Sanford said earlier. He said there is a nationwide reaction to the charges and he is glad that people, especially women have noticed it.

Patel was arrested in July last year. According to the charge sheet filed by Galen Pelletier, detective with South Bend Police Department, on July 13, 2013, at approximately 9:24 pm, Patel presented to the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital in Mishawaka, Indiana.

She was bleeding from her vaginal area. The emergency personnel believed that she had recently delivered a child, which she denied. 

Dr Tracy Byrne found an umbilical cord was protruding. But Patel again denied she had just delivered a baby and claimed that she had not even been pregnant. 

Concerned for the child's welfare, doctors continued to question her about the whereabouts of the child. Eventually, she told the medical staff that she had delivered a baby in her home and she did not see it breathing or moving and believed it to be dead. She then put the dead body in a bag and placed it in a dumpster. She further told medical personnel that she was roughly two months pregnant and had a miscarriage.

But doctor's believed that she had been twenty eight (28) to thirty (30) weeks post fertilization.

Soon the body was located the lifeless body in a dumpster and doctors determined that it was pre-mature and roughly thirty weeks from conception.

Later forensic pathologist, Dr Joseph Prahlow determined that the child was pre-mature but at least twenty eight weeks from conception. Dr. Prahlow further concluded that in his opinion, the child had been born alive and had taken a breath.

Officers secured a search warrant for the phone of Patel and found that she discussed the pregnancy with at least one friend.

According to doctors, one of the drugs she used would induce labor, thereby ending her pregnancy. The other drug was designed to end the life of a fetus, but only if it was within nine weeks old.

Attorney Sanford told the judge the pathologist's tests don't prove that the baby was born alive. 

The defense brought Dr Shaku Teas, a forensic pathologist, who told the jury that Patel’s fetus ‘was not viable,’ and it could not have survived outside of the womb.

Dr Teas estimated that Patel’s pregnancy was in the 23 to 24 month range and stated that there was no evidence that the child ever took a breath. Teas said breathing probably wasn’t possible, given a lack of development in the child’s lungs, according to reports.

But prosecutors pointed out that the doctor was being paid to testify, and didn't personally handle the child's body during her examination.

Patel did not testify at the trial. Her father testified that he didn’t even know his daughter had a boyfriend, let alone that she was pregnant. He said he would have loved his daughter’s child and would have welcomed it into the family home anyway.

Patel is the second woman in Indiana to be charged with feticide following the prolonged criminal prosecution of Bei Bei Shuai, who lost her baby when she tried to kill herself.

Shuai, who is from China and Patel are Asians, a fact which was noted by some. But Sanford said he does not see any discrimination in charging them.

Who determines my rights?

Devangi Raval of Manavi, a women’s rights organization in New Jersey, soon after Patel was convicted

What are we, as women, and a South Asian women’s organization, to make of the conviction of Purvi Patel in Indiana for feticide and neglecting the fetus she was carrying? Besides the logical contradictions embedded in the ruling, how does it uphold the nuances of Roe v Wade that guarantees women privacy and decision making rights over her body?

Manavi deplores the conviction of Ms. Patel and understands it as a deliberate attempt to chip away at the choice that women in the US have been rightfully claiming vis-à-vis Roe v Wade. It sends a chilling note to all women in Indiana, in fact women in every state, that their rights over their bodies and reproductive actions are limited; they are nothing but vessels for gestation.

As many have pointed out, this conviction is likely to make women wary of seeking medical help when they are suffering a miscarriage, lest they be charged with criminal misdeeds. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, at least 600 women have been arrested or faced forcible intervention for seeking abortions between 1973 and 2011. So far, 38 states have ‘fetal homicide’ laws that claim to protect the rights of the fetus, as well as the woman. These laws, in practice however, are creeping toward the criminalization of women who seek abortions or suffer ‘questionable’ miscarriages.

When the State believes a fetus has more rights than the live woman who is carrying it, it is setting a dangerous precedent. We witnessed its consequence in the 2012 death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar in Galway, Ireland. Despite Dr Halappanavar’s repeated assertions that she was miscarrying her pregnancy at 17 weeks, hospitals refused to perform a life-saving abortion until she was near death of septicemia. She, too, was a gestational vessel after all!

We, at Manavi, strongly protest this privileging of the fetus over the woman. We perceive Ms. Patel’s trial and conviction as a blatant injustice and disregard of her reproductive rights, a right that all women must have in society.