In February, 33-year-old Indiana resident Purvi Patel was found guilty of both feticide and child neglect after delivering a 24-week-old stillborn child at home and disposing of the body in a dumpster—an act that was discovered after she went to the hospital, bleeding, and the doctor discovered an umbilical cord.
Although the Indiana jury deliberated for less than five hours before delivering their verdict, the charges were obviously bizarre for a number of reasons, the most simple being that feticide and child neglect both hinge on the same question and cancel each other out: if Patel had killed her fetus (allegedly with abortion drugs purchased online) then there would be no child for her to criminally neglect; if the child was born alive and then violently neglected by way of disposal, it would be impossible for Patel to have committed feticide.
And, of course, the toxicologists never found any traces of abortion drugs in her body or in the fetus’s body, and police never found evidence that Patel actually bought the drugs she had alluded to via text messages to a friend. It seems that she simply had a miscarriage, at 24 weeks, which is barely on the edge of viable; however, to prove that the child was born alive and thus within medical rescue, the prosecutors used an arcane, discredited 17th-century test in which the fetus’s lungs are removed and put in liquid to see if they can float, and they floated. That was enough for Patel to be found guilty.
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