A Woman's Rights

By Editorial Board, The New York Times

29 December 18

More and more laws are treating a fetus as a person, and a woman as less of one, as states charge pregnant women with crimes...

ou might be surprised to learn that in the United States a woman coping with the heartbreak of losing her pregnancy might also find herself facing jail time. Say she got in a car accident in New York or gave birth to a stillborn in Indiana: In such cases, women have been charged with manslaughter.

In fact, a fetus need not die for the state to charge a pregnant woman with a crime. Women who fell down the stairs, who ate a poppy seed bagel and failed a drug test or who took legal drugs during pregnancy — drugs prescribed by their doctors — all have been accused of endangering their children.

Such cases are rare. There have been several hundred of them since the Supreme Court issued its decision ratifying abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, in 1973. But they illuminate a deep shift in American society, away from a centuries-long tradition in Western law and toward the embrace of a relatively new concept: that a fetus in the womb has the same rights as a fully formed person.

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