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  Is a Stillbirth a Crime?

  Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 5:00 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Maybe not in South Carolina, it turns out. You may remember Regina McKnight, who in 2001 was convicted of "homicide by child abuse" for her stillbirth. The state argued that she'd killed her fetus by using cocaine while pregnant. This week, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned her conviction, saying her public defender failed to do a decent job representing her at trial (or to use the technical term, because of "ineffective counsel")—in part by failing to present medical evidence about the shaky link between the stillbirth and the cocaine use.

  This means, I guess, that my sibs and I can't go file criminal charges against our mother for giving us asthma and allergies by smoking while she was pregnant. (Yes, Mom, I know it was way back in the Dark Ages when everyone was doing it. But if everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you jump too??). Alas! The end of personal responsibility is nigh!

  But seriously, folks. McKnight was sentenced to 12 years in prison, without parole, for a failed pregnancy. Right now she's still in prison, while the state decides whether or not to appeal. Read more here, here, and here.

  Filed under: feminism, motherhood, criminal law

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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