Foeticide: Indo American Woman’s Sentence Raises Eyebrows

Purvi Patel, a 33 year old Indian-American woman, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison in the US for female foeticide and child maltreatment. The police said to the media that she had gone to the hospital suffering from heavy vaginal bleeding. Though she denied being a pregnant, she admitted that she had miscarried and placed the stillborn foetus in a bag and placed the bag in a dumpster. The police also made it clear that they had found so many text messages in her cellphone that proved that she had real intention to commit foeticide. According to the prosecution, Mrs Patel had ordered abortion-inducing drugs from Hong Kong that caused her to have the child on the floor of her bathroom. Against the allegation of the prosecution, Purvi Patel’s defence is expected to file an appeal, who has 30 days for the same.

However, the allegation against Mr Purvi has to be seen in the context of unjust and unethical laws that still exist in Indiana. Earlier, it had formulated a law that allowed discrimination on the basis of religion, which has already posed existential threat to the sexual minorities. The case of Purvi Patel also unveils the unethical underpinning inherent in Indiana’s laws. The evidence that the police is said to have unearthed is seen by many as being ungrounded because it has failed to prove that Mrs Puruvi had used miscarriage-inducing drugs. It can be said that the charge of feticide against her is contradictory since it requires Patel to have killed the baby while it is still in the womb, and that “felony of neglect of a dependent requires delivering a baby and abandoning it.

Mrs Patel is the second woman to get charged under the Anti-Choice Abortion Law. In 2011, Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, had been accused of feticide after she committed suicide when she was 8 months pregnant. Both cases reveal that medical authorities and the government have failed to ensure fair treatment of pregnant women in the state. When they needed help, the authorities turned a deaf ear to them and instead of providing medical requirements, they formulated what seems to be contradictory and unethical rules, discrediting the pregnant women’s rights .

The fact that the women terminate their pregnancies should not be a viable reason to execute the outrageous laws like Anti-Choice Feticide that will only result in negation on the part of medical authorities of pregnant women’s claims, which will make the women hide and avoid medical attention and put their lives at greater risk. Even after the law has been implemented throughout the state, researchers have revealed that the rate of abortion has not declined as women started committing self-abortion, which has gone unreported in the statistics.