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 Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:43 am
Taken from: http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/idaho-woman-charged-with/
Full title: "Idaho Woman Charged With 'Unlawful Abortion," Turned in by Anti-Choice Advocate"
Unable to afford the doctors visits and medical bills associated with an actual medical abortion, Jennie L. McCormack of Idaho instead had her sister purchase drugs online to ingest in order to cause a miscarriage. McCormack, who is the mother of three, is now being charged with "unlawful abortion" according to the Associated Press.
If McCormack is found guilty, she could be subject to a $5000 penalty as well as up to five years in prison.
McCormack's case is a sign of the true desperation of women in this country. She said she believed she was only 14 weeks along, although the examination of the remains concluded it was more likely 20-25. She is already a mother of more than one child, one still a toddler. But financially she was cut off from any choice she wanted to make about how many people she wanted in her family, unable to procure an abortion she couldn't afford, and now facing criminal penalties for taking the only option left to her.
According to the report, McCormack was turned into the police by the sister of on of her friends, a woman who stated "There's other things she could have done. She could have asked for some type of help."
But it's obvious that the only "help" that was acceptable in this situation, according to the tipster, was to have the baby, and that the woman who contacted the police did it solely to punish McCormack. "I'm a grandmother myself. And the love and the compassion I have for my grandkids? They're my life. And I felt that if somebody didn't speak up for this baby, who would? It doesn't have a voice anymore," Carnahan said.
Idaho has recently passed a 20 week abortion ban, making any abortion after that point a criminal activity. How many more women will take it into their own hands to try and self-abort due to the lack of ability to obtain a doctor who can perform the procedure safely? And how many women are conservatives willing to throw in jail for the crime of not wanting to add another mouth to feed to their families?
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Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 8:08 am
Seesh. That's sad on multiple levels.
I clicked the link to the article you posted, then I clicked their source too. Well, according to that article, she kept the baby in a box under her bed for a week. When it started to smell, she put it out on the back porch, which is where police found it. She also had her first baby at 15. Given that along with the fact that most methods of birth control are very effect and usually only fail when people don't use them correctly and that she didn't even realize that she was pregnant until she was pretty darn far along, I'm guessing this is a mentally ill woman who either wasn't using birth control or wasn't using it correctly and may have even been taken advantage of sexually. Yet rather than call Social Services, or call the police to let them know that a guy is sleeping with a mentally ill woman, or get her and her kids some other kind of help, someone offers to buy miscarriage pills for her and someone else calls the police just because they don't like abortion. Sad.
So I think this is probably even more of a mental illness issue than an a woman's rights issue (hopefully the police will now get her the help she needs though). But I definitely do wonder why clinics don't offer free abortions (well, that's what I hear anyway, I've never actually looked into abortion services myself), but they'll offer free birth control, pregnancy tests, STD tests, etc. I don't really understand why they would draw the line there. Especially since clinics get a lot of abused or mentally ill women as it is, you'd think they'd want to help them and keep an eye on them through the abortion process too rather than driving them to pills and knitting needles.
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