Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

As long as McCarthy is Speaker, the House will never be in order.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Ah, the different things are different argument.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / Her Body, The Government’s Rules

Her Body, The Government’s Rules

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So much for her body, her rules: Anna Yocca, a Tennessee woman, was arrested last week and charged with attempted first-degree murder after she was rushed to the hospital following a failed attempt with a coat hanger to abort her 24-week pregnancy. At the hospital she delivered a 1.5 pound baby boy:

Pro-choice advocates see Yocca’s situation as the end result of a rash of highly restrictive laws that have choked reproductive rights throughout Tennessee, largely since voters approved a November 2014 amendment to the state constitution that awarded lawmakers sweeping powers to chip away at access to reproductive health care. … “Tennessee’s homicide law explicitly doesn’t apply to [Yocca],” explained Farah Diaz-Tello, senior staff attorney at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, “but this arrest tells women that if they try to seek emergency medical assistance, they may end up behind bars. That won’t stop women from having abortions, but it will stop them from getting help.”

Team Blackness also discussed video footage of a Baltimore police officer attacking a protestor for no reason, two high school students who were jailed over wearing baggy pants, and an update on the police officer who killed Amadou Diallo (spoiler alert: he’s just doing fine).

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13Comments

  4. 4.

    Anonymous At Work

    It’s an uphill and hard climb for any prosecutors. Criminal statutes are narrowly construed in favor of defendants. If the power isn’t explicitly given, or the statute isn’t explicit about murder, then it is not murder.

  5. 5.

    gene108

    @Anonymous At Work:

    It’s an uphill and hard climb for any prosecutors. Criminal statutes are narrowly construed in favor of defendants. If the power isn’t explicitly given, or the statute isn’t explicit about murder, then it is not murder.

    The God-botherers will find a way to lock her up. They did this in Indiana.

    When Purvi Patel arrived at the St. Joseph Hospital emergency room on July 13, 2013, blood was flowing from her pelvis.

    At first, the 33-year-old Granger woman denied she had delivered a baby. But as doctors pressed her about her condition, Patel said she had miscarried and discarded the body in a dumpster.

    Witnesses would later describe Patel as a woman who conceived a child as a result of an affair with a married man, and hid the pregnancy from her religiously conservative family. But the circumstances led prosecutors to probe into other possible motives.

    And what they found — in text messages to a friend and emails to a company that sells abortion drugs over the Internet — led to an outcome that has thrust her into the nation’s debate over women’s reproductive rights and abortion.

    On Feb. 3, Patel became the first Indiana woman to be convicted of feticide in connection with her own miscarriage. Legal experts say her 20-year sentence for feticide and neglect of a dependent add up to one of the most severe penalties an American woman has faced for aborting her own pregnancy.

    Link

  6. 6.

    PurpleGirl

    Elon: Did you refer to Amadou Diallo based my comment to your posting yesterday? I think it is shameful that the four officers were able to continue with their lives and that one officer is still with the NYPD 17 years after the shooting of Amadou Diallo. I think it is reprehensible that the NBC news story I heard yesterday didn’t tell the WHOLE story of 41 shots and 19 hits. I’m a middle-aged, working-class white woman and Amadou Diallo’s tragic story still hurts. Black Lives Matter!

  7. 7.

    Roger Moore

    @Anonymous At Work:

    It’s an uphill and hard climb for any prosecutors.

    It’s still forcing a woman who was obviously at the end of her tether in the first place to defend herself against the power of the state. Maybe a first rate lawyer could get her acquitted, but if she had the money for a first rate lawyer, she probably would have had the resources to jump through the hoops and get a legal abortion. Her best hope is that she’ll be enough of a cause celebre that people will pay to get her a good lawyer, and even then she’s going to be going through legal hell for no good reason.

  8. 8.

    PurpleGirl

    Women have tried to self-abort for all time. They have found papyri from Ancient Egypt describing how to about using crocodile dung, among other methods.

  9. 9.

    denali

    @Gene108,

    Thank you for your link to the Patel case. Truly horrifying outcome. Would like to know the current status of this case.

  10. 10.

    patrick II

    @gene108:
    Ms. Patel is an Indian-American. I wonder how soon it will be before they convict a white woman and give her a 20 year sentence .

  11. 11.

    Sad_Dem

    @patrick II: Can you imagine a “top-down” rule of law that no punishment shall be inflicted on anyone poor until after a rich person has first experienced it?

  12. 12.

    MomSense

    @Baud:

    Government so small it can fit inside a uterus.

    I’m going to listen later tonight but I know it’s going to be tough.

  13. 13.

    Mnemosyne

    @patrick II:

    If the “right” white woman (ie poor and drug addicted) was put on trial, a jury would totally convict, but I’ve started to realize that the racism is really in the escalation — most white women would never even be investigated in the first place, much less be prosecuted.

    It’s like the black teenage girl who was body-slammed by a white security guard. It’s not that a white security guard wouldn’t have beaten up a white teenage girl, it’s that the security guard never would have been called in the first place if the girl had been white.

    (Edited for grammar)

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