“Two women were charged with murder after having stillbirths": ObI | The Digital Waiting Room

Reddit is where patients go at 2 a.m. when scared. I monitor dozens of communities for clinically meaningful posts: dangerous myths, gaps between belief and evidence, stories guidelines cannot capture. This series -- ObGyn Intelligence on Reddit -- dissects them against the literature, because ObGyns who ignore social media ignore the most unfiltered window into what patients think, fear, and do between appointments.

In 2018 and 2019, two women in Kings County, California -- both struggling with methamphetamine addiction -- delivered stillborn babies and were charged with murder by District Attorney Keith Fagundes under a California fetal murder statute originally written to protect pregnant women from assault. One woman, Adora Perez, served nearly four years in prison after a guilty plea to manslaughter. The other, Chelsea Becker, spent 16 months in pretrial detention on a $2 million bail before her murder charge was dismissed. Both convictions were eventually overturned. The DA invoked a law meant to protect pregnant women from third-party violence and turned it against the mothers themselves. When asked why, he said: “Somebody’s gotta be a voice for that fetus.” That one sentence generated 51,000 upvotes and nearly 3,000 comments on Reddit’s r/politics. The thread became a proxy for the national conversation about reproductive rights, drug addiction, and who gets to decide when a pregnancy becomes a crime scene.

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