In a judicial pronouncement that has pitted women’s rights activists against anti-abortion groups, a US court has sentenced an Indian-American woman to 20 years in prison after a jury convicted her of feticide and child neglect. Purvi Patel, a 33-year-old unmarried woman from Indiana, is the first woman to be convicted and sentenced for alleged feticide under the State’s stringent law against feticide. Patel, who was accused of aborting a seven-month fetus and throwing it in a dumpster, denied the charge of feticide, asserting it was a case of miscarriage.
But the Indiana jury found her guilty on all counts last month, convicting her of using abortion drugs bought online to terminate her pregnancy and of child neglect, thereby going with the prosecution line that Patel gave birth to a live fetus, not a stillborn child. On Monday, the Indiana court effectively sentenced Patel to 20 years in prison. Judge Elizabeth Hurley, announcing the sentence, said she considered the fact that Patel had no criminal history and had expressed remorse in a letter to the court.
In July 2013, Patel showed up at the emergency room of St. Joseph Regional Medical Centre in the town of Mishawaka, with heavy vaginal bleeding. Doctors determined she had lost a pregnancy. Media reports from Indiana said Patel confessed that she had left the fetus, which she maintained was stillborn, in a dumpster, near a restaurant that Patel’s parents owned. Police questioned Patel and searched her cellphone while she was in the hospital, which led them to a series of text messages the prosecution claimed made the case for Patel’s illegal abortion and felony charges.
The prosecution claimed that Patel, in those text messages, admitted to ordering abortion-inducing drugs online from Hong Kong to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The drugs reportedly caused her to have the child on the floor of her bathroom.
In the court, Patel’s supporters wore purple and white and were joined by members of the Indiana Religious Coalition for Reproductive Freedom and Apna Ghar, a Chicago-based group advocating Southeast Asian women’s rights. Patel’s defence is expected to file an appeal. “Purvi Patel’s conviction amounts to punishment for a having a miscarriage and then seeking medical care, something that no woman should worry would lead to jail time,” said Deepa Iyer, Activist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies Programme and former director of South Asian Americans leading Together.