The dangers of health care providers reporting self-performed abortions to law enforcement

Abortion rights advocates fear that girls, especially those from marginalized communities, will stop searching for medical care as health care employees alert law enforcement about patients who self-abort.

According to According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), self-administered abortion occurs when a girl terminates her pregnancy, normally by non-traditional means similar to taking medications, vitamins, herbs, alcohol, or other toxic substances. They are sometimes performed by individuals who experience barriers to accessing abortion care, including people of color, people from low-income communities, and other people who live in states that restrict abortion or in areas close to medical facilities.

The If/When/How Legal Defense Fund recently investigated the case of Lizelle Gonzalez, a Texas woman who was charged with murder in reference to a self-arranged abortion. Gonzalez took misoprostol, an abortion drug normally combined with mifepristone, to end her pregnancy at 19 weeks.

Gonzalez was treated at a neighborhood hospital and released after experiencing abdominal pain. The next day she visited the hospital where doctors performed a cesarean section to deliver the stillborn baby.

Doctors notified the district attorney’s office of Gonzalez’s self-administered abortion, which led to the murder charges being dropped.

Under Texas law, a pregnant person can’t be held criminally answerable for performing their very own abortion.

Johnson added that the circumstances that will legally require a health care provider to appear before law enforcement are “very limited.”

Gonzalez alleges in her lawsuit that she suffered harm consequently of her arrest, spending two days in jail and feeling the influence of the media covering her case.

Explaining how media coverage can harm people accused of a criminal offense, Kidvai of the If/When/How’s Repro Legal Defense Fund said: “Often, information from prosecutors or law enforcement agencies is leaked to the media so as to shape the general public narrative of a case. “

“This shape cannot be trusted,” Kidvai added. “Lizelle’s case is very representative of this very problem… prosecutors made false statements to pursue her case.”

Gonzalez filed a $1 million lawsuit against Starr County District Attorney Gocha Ramirez for wrongly charging her with murder.

Meanwhile, Ramirez and the Texas State Bar Association reached an agreement under which the prosecutor would pay a $1,250 high-quality and have his law license suspended for 12 months.

Kidvai said it’s “devastating and appalling” that prosecutors are usually not being held accountable in any “real way and continue to fail to act” despite the “enormity of violence, harm and cruelty that prosecutors are capable of inflicting on communities in the name of justice.” “. “

Gonzalez’s case occurred before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, giving states the facility to pass their very own abortion laws. Since then, many states across the country, including Texas, Idaho, Florida, Georgia and Alabama, have passed abortion bans which have enacted restrictions which have disproportionately affected women of color.

Kidvai, of If/When/How’s Repro Legal Defense Fund, said marginalized communities are disproportionately targeted by prosecutors and law enforcement in abortion cases because “that is the purpose of criminalization.”

Their goal is to “break up communities and inflict further trauma on marginalized people,” Kidvai argued.

Kidvai added that individuals of color are “surveilled in various ways.”

“Who gets reported is not just an accident. This is not accidental,” Kidvai continued. “It’s about people’s biases…that lead to why people are reported in the first place.”

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