Virginia: Proposal to Require Women Report All Miscarriages

In what many will perceive as a sign of the growing lunacy of the Christian Right, Delegate John Cosgrove has introduced a bill in Virginia that would require all women to report a miscarriage within 12 hours or risk 12 months in jail and a USD $2,500 fine. Lunacy? No, it's quite consistent and expected within the Christian Right's war on abortion.

Daily Kos provides the details:

Cosgrove's bill requires any woman who experiences "fetal death" without a doctor's assistance to report this to the local law-enforcement agency within twelve hours of the miscarriage.  Failure to do so is punishable as a Class 1 Misdemeanor.

Almost all states mandate reporting of fetal deaths to vital statistics bureaus.  These statistics are then collected nationally by the CDC.  In most states, health care providers must provide reports on fetal deaths after 20 weeks gestation (or at a certain fetal weight approximating 20 weeks gestation). Virginia is one of only 7 states, however, that mandate the reporting of loss of all "products of conception" regardless of gestational age.  This includes both spontaneous losses of pregnancy and induced terminations of pregnancy, though the required data elements are different for abortions.

In Virginia, all losses of pregnancy must be reported by health care providers according to current law.  The reality, though, is that countless women experience spontaneous abortions in the first few gestational weeks without even being aware of pregnancy, so not all losses of "products of conception" are reported.  Women who experience miscarriages at home without a doctor's care may not even think to inform their doctors, especially if the pregnancy is so early that they have not yet even sought prenatal care.  Until this bill, though, no one has suggested it was in the interest of the Commonwealth of Virginia to track down these unreported losses of "products of conception".

[T]here is no law mandating that a woman must report a pregnancy to the Commonwealth, or even seek medical treatment for one.  But this bill proposes that a woman report a LOSS of  a pregnancy to the Commonwealth, whatever the gestational age of the embryo/fetus.

Furthermore, this bill means that a woman who experiences a spontaneous loss of pregnancy will have her privacy violated significantly more than if she had chosen an abortion.  Though Virginia requires that induced terminations of pregnancy be reported, those reporting forms require only a "patient number" and information on the procedure.  The "report of fetal death" asks for the woman's full name, her history of prenatal care, her marital status, her education history, her previous deliveries (if any), and a number of other very intrusive data items.

If the miscarriage occurred under a physician's care, all of this information would be provided by the physician out of the patient's medical records.  Physicians and/or funeral directors are given 24 hours to file this report.  Delegate Cosgrove's bill gives women who experience miscarriage without a doctor only 12 hours to report, adding insult to injury.

Many may find such requirements to be bizarre, but in the world of the Christian Right they aren't. We have to remember that these people want to criminalize abortion. The only way to effectively do that, though, is to be able to differentiate between induced abortions and spontaneous miscarriages. A bill like this is an import step on the road to criminalizing abortion for a couple of reasons.

First, it lays the legal groundwork for registering pregnancies and keeping track of which pregnancies end without a birth. Second it lays the conceptual ground work be getting people to accept the idea that the state has the authority to keep track of such matters. The loss of privacy comes in small stages, with this being just one of them. If Virginia is going to criminalize abortion, this will make their job much easier and I suspect that Cosgrove knows it.

Lunacy? Not at all. It's dangerous and wrong, but it's not lunacy. It's exactly what we should expect. It's interesting that some have in the past offered such laws as logically necessary to the criminalization of abortion, implying that since such laws are unthinkable then criminalizing abortion wouldn't work. And who would support such invasive laws anyway? Truth can be stranger than fiction, though, and there aren't any laws so bizarre that the Christian Right won't endorse them if they may help them achieve their theocratic goals.

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Religious Right News
• Christian Extremism