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6 hours ago
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Avoid (having a miscarriage in) West Virginia
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“Hello, I would like to report the fact that I am having a very heavy period. Can you send a police officer over right away to collect my menstrual matter and check whether I’ve broken any laws?”
The above is not a transcript of an actual conversation in West Virginia but, the way things are headed, it could be a glimpse of what’s to come. The Raleigh county prosecuting attorney Tom Truman recently warned that women who have a pregnancy loss in West Virginia could face criminal charges. To protect themselves, Truman said, women should call local law enforcement and report a miscarriage – which is the loss of a pregnancy before the 20th week. “Call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say: ‘I miscarried. I want you to know,’” Truman told the outlet WVNS 59News.
Truman said he was personally opposed to prosecuting women who miscarry. But he warned that other prosecutors in West Virginia had indicated that they would be willing to file criminal charges against women who had lost a pregnancy via state laws related to the disposal of human remains. “I thought these guys were just chewing on a Dreamsicle,” Truman lamented. But, he added, West Virginia’s laws include definitions that are “pretty broad-ranging” and give law enforcement a lot of discretion to go after women who have had a pregnancy loss.
To be very clear about the law: while abortion is all but banned in West Virginia, the pregnant person themselves can’t be prosecuted for having an abortion. Miscarriages also aren’t explicitly criminalized. However, law enforcement can get creative and use legislation that governs the handling of fetal remains to punish women. And this sort of “creativity” isn’t just confined to West Virginia: following the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, a lot of women who experience pregnancy loss in the US have been plunged into legal limbo.
While it would appear that Truman was trying to be helpful, I should note that calling the police isn’t necessarily the best idea in a scenario where you have experienced, or suspect you’ve experienced, a miscarriage. “It’s always a mistake to invite law enforcement into your reproductive life,” Kim Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School, told CNN. “I understand the idea that caution is better than being caught up in something that you weren’t anticipating, but it is difficult for me to imagine any circumstance in which I would think it was safe for someone who miscarried to call the police.”
If you are going to call the police, you might want to quiz them on their understanding of the female reproductive system before going into any details. After all, how many of the men salivating over the prospect of locking up women for miscarriages do you think actually know what a miscarriage is? How many of them do you think understand that an estimated 23m miscarriages occur every year globally and about 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriages? Again, that’s known pregnancies: a lot of miscarriages happen before someone even realizes they’re pregnant. We don’t have the full picture of why pregnancy losses occur, but they are quite often due to chromosomal abnormalities. They are often, in other words, completely out of the woman’s control. And a very early miscarriage (also known as a chemical pregnancy) can be hard to distinguish from a period. Sometimes the only way to tell the difference is via medical interventions like a blood test or an ultrasound.
All that said, this does strike me as a situation where a little malicious compliance wouldn’t go amiss. I’m not saying women in West Virginia should call up the prosecutor’s office whenever they’re menstruating and ask to speak to someone about the size and consistency of their blood clots or inquire whether they’d like to send a police officer to examine the toilet before they flush. Nor am I saying that women in West Virginia should drop off their used sanitary items at their local police station so they can be thoroughly examined by the powers that be. But I’m not not saying that either!
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It’s been a wild week for runaway animals. In Tennessee, a pet zebra went on the lam, causing chaos on Interstate 24. Meanwhile, in the UK, a bull ran loose around the streets of Birmingham. “This magnificent animal seemed to be enjoying an unexpected city break,” a Birmingham councillor said in a statement, noting the bull had been moved to safety. No word yet on which Birmingham sights the bull took in, or whether it popped into any china shops.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
