Legal Questions Over Mother Accused Of Trying To Self-Abort Child

According to local news reports based on accounts from the arresting police officers, she lay in a bath before piercing herself with the hanger but became alarmed by the amount of blood she was losing and called her boyfriend, who rushed her to hospital. In Tennessee, reproductive rights activists express concern that implementation of a “fetal assault” law in July of 2014 – a law apparently meant to stop pregnant people from using drugs by deeming it “misdemeanor assault” to give birth to a child that shows physical effects from its mother’s drug use – could serve as a precedent for prosecuting Yocca or others who are found trying to self-induce an abortion should other criminal charges fall through.

Decreased abortion access. Safe abortions are hardly easy for women of any socioeconomic status to obtain in Tennessee. Tellingly, 34 percent of women said that they were personally against abortion but could understand why a woman might attempt to self-induce.

If Yocca has been contemplating abortion in the few weeks leading up to her coat hanger attempt, her in-state options would have been limited.

“There are plenty of places for her to go”. There is no excuse for that.

A Tennessee woman is facing an indictment for first-degree attempted murder after she tried to self-abort, offering a stark illustration of how restrictions on reproductive healthcare and criminalization of abortion can impact individuals in the United States. We all have to obey the law whether they are convenient or not convenient. She lived about a half hour’s drive away from Nashville, where the nearest health center offering abortions is located. Now, a shocking case in Tennessee has put it in the center of the national discourse on abortion once again.

Fetal homicide is a crime in 38 states, including Tennessee. “I find it annoying that when a woman breaks the law if it’s related to abortion then pro-aborts want to cry and say it’s because we have too restrictive abortion laws”, continued Sullenger, who said she counted seven abortion clinics in Tennessee, and Tennessee “is not that big of a state”.

But the US has some of the most unrestricted abortion laws in the world. To boot, almost all of the clinics are in cities like Memphis, Nashville and Chatanooga, which means that women in rural areas are basically screwed. Women are constitutionally entitled to an abortion in the United States under the 1973 supreme court ruling Roe v Wade.

This is obviously a hard situation.

Yocca was still talking about her pregnancy when in the hospital, The Post said, if her use of a coat hanger maybe didn’t make that clear.

According to a study in Contraception, women with less education or who have experienced more disruptive events in the past year (e.g. unemployment, divorce, missing rent or mortgage payments, etc.) are more likely to seek an abortion during the second trimester, when time is already running out in many states to receive the procedure legally.