An Indiana woman is facing 20 years in prison for "feticide"

          Purvi Patel was sentenced to prison for feticide and neglect of a dependent on March 30 at the St. Joseph County Courthouse in South Bend,

Indiana.

Indiana did something unprecedented this week: it sentenced a woman to a 20-year prison sentence for violating a decades-old feticide law.

Purvi Patel's conviction, announced on Monday, is the first American case in which a court has found a pregnant woman guilty of violating a fetal homicide law.


Patel arrived at the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center’s maternity ward in July 2013 with an exposed umbilical cord, bleeding heavily, according to court documents. She had taken off work because of severe cramping. She told doctors that she then had the miscarriage, where she noticed the stillborn fetus among the blood.

Saying she "didn’t know what else to do," she placed the body in a dumpster and went to the hospital.

Patel later told detectives she hadn’t wanted her strict Hindu parents to find out about the pregnancy.

Indiana pursued charges of feticide against Patel: in court, the state argued that she had violated a 1979 law that prohibits violence against fetuses. A jury trial ruled against Patel on Monday, on charges of feticide and child neglect. Patel is now sentenced to a minimum of 20 years — and maximum of 70 — in prison.

Some of the details of the Patel case are still unclear: there are questions, for example, over whether she took abortion-inducing drugs — the drugs that were the basis of her feticide conviction.

Feticide laws exist in most American states, and many have been on the books for decades. Prosecutors have generally used them to pursue more aggressive charges against those who commit violence against pregnant women.

The Indiana case, however, suggests a significantly different use for these laws: to prosecute women who appear to have harmed their own fetuses. Reproductive-health advocates worry this could ultimately prove dangerous for women, who could face possible legal issues, particularly those who miscarry a child.

"Prosecutors in Indiana are using this very sad situation to establish that intentional abortions as well as unintentional pregnancy losses should be punished as crimes," Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the Guardian in August 2014. "No woman should be arrested for the outcome of her pregnancy."