When the cops came for her Patience Frazier had no idea why:
Earlier that month, Frazier had shared a Facebook post about the son she lost. She had apologized to Abel, saying she was “so scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do,” court records show.
“Why would you be sorry?” asked Jacqueline “Jac” Mitcham, the 31-year-old deputy on Frazier’s doorstep, according to body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post. “Why would you be sorry, Patience?”
Frazier looked over at the other armed officers standing 10 feet away.
“I’m not allowed to have personal things in my life?” said Frazier, a mother of three. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f—ing miscarriage?”
Even before Roe v. Wade fell, a broad consensus had emerged across much of the antiabortion movement that women who seek abortions should not be prosecuted. The abortion bans that have taken effect since Roe was overturned, as well as abortion restrictions that existed before the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, do not allow women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate abortions.
But those measures don’t tell the full story. In rare and often little-noticed cases, authorities have drawn on other laws to charge women accused of trying to end their pregnancies.Some prosecutors in both red and blue states have used sweeping statutes entirely unrelated to abortion — like child abuse, improper disposal of remains or murder — while others have relied on criminal laws written to protect a fetus.In Nevada, Frazier would eventually be charged with manslaughter under a unique 1911 law that supplements the state’s abortion restrictions, titled “taking drugs to terminate pregnancy.”
As in Frazier’s case, women who are prosecuted are typically accused of trying to end pregnancies without the help of a medical professional — a method frequently chosen because they live far from an abortion clinicand can’t afford to get to one. These prosecutions also often occur when women are thought to be relatively far along in pregnancy, near or past the point when a fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb.
Based on a review of hundreds of documents, hours of body-cam footage and interviews with those involved, a Post investigation of Frazier’s case offers new insight into the messy complexities and intensely personal emotions embedded within such a prosecution. From the start, deep moral questions loomed over a local justice system as it struggled to distinguish a miscarriage from an abortion, a fetus from a baby — culminating in a conviction one judge would ultimately characterize as “a total miscarriage of justice.”
[…]
Out on bail in the months before that day’s sentencing hearing, Frazier had felt like an outcast in her small town of 8,000. Her best friend had stopped talking to her. False details about her case swirled around Facebook. The first time she tried to go to the grocery store, she said, a group of teenage boys chased her down the aisle yelling, “baby killer.”
“Winds of prejudice have arisen,” Frazier’s public defender, Matt Stermitz, wrote in a court filing. “A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the City of Winnemucca.”
She was sentenced to 30 months to 8 years largely on the basis of the anti-abortion fanatic cop who arrested her. The whole story is aboslutely appalling. I’ve included a gift link (yes, it’s the Washington Post, but the reporters who wrote this story aren’t Jeff Bezos) and I urge you to read the whole thing to see just how screwed up our abortion policies have been for a very long time.
A high profile lawyer came on to the case after she’d been in prison for a year and she was eventually released on the basis of ineffective counsel.
“Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system,” Judge Charles McGee wrote in an emotional 40-page decision, describing Frazier’s case as a “total miscarriage of justice.”
The emotional intensity of the abortion issue subtly propelled Frazier’s case from the start, the judge said later in an interview with The Post.
By taking up Frazier’s case, he said, the prosecutor in Winnemucca was able to send a clear message to the antiabortion constituents who elected him: “We don’t tolerate that kind of stuff here in cowboy country.”
Women have been cannon fodder in the culture wars over this issue for a very long time. The frightening thing is that it’s getting even worse in the Trump ban states. We know what these forced birth fanatics have always wanted and they’ve now been exposed.
Let’s just hope that the voters understand the stakes in this election and send a strong, unambiguous message that right wing zealots are not going to be allowed to control the most intimate decisions of people’s personal lives any longer.
