Woman released after winning feticide appeal

A judge Thursday released from prison an Indiana woman whose high-profile feticide conviction was overturned in July. In 2013, Purvi Patel said she took illegal abortion-causing drugs and delivered a 25-week, stillborn baby boy. The state argued she delivered a live baby, neglected him, and he died. A jury found Patel guilty of neglect and feticide, originally sentencing her to 20 years in prison.

But the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned Patel’s feticide conviction, and Thursday a judge cut her 20-year sentence to 18 months, releasing her to piece her life back together.

At the trial in 2015, 35-year-old Patel admitted she placed the baby in a bag and threw him in a dumpster behind her family’s restaurant. When she continued bleeding, she went to the nearby St. Joseph Regional Medical Center, where Dr. Kelly McGuire said it was clear to him something was not right.

“This was not a simple miscarriage,” McGuire told jurors, according to WSBT. “There should have been a baby at the end of the umbilical cord.”

McGuire suspected child abuse and called the police, who drove to the restaurant and searched for the baby. He followed the police to the scene, still wearing his hospital scrubs.

They found the body lying in the dumpster and covered in bloody tissues and cloths. McGuire pronounced him dead on site, though he believed the infant could have been born alive, WSBT said. The baby was 25 weeks old from conception and weighed 1.5 lbs, stretching just longer than a football.

Patel said she was embarrassed about the pregnancy and wanted to conceal it from her parents. Sadly, this story of fear and infant abandonment is not unusual.

OB-GYN Christina Francis said many women abandon their babies in secret because they worry about being seen. One nonprofit program, Safe Haven Baby Box, combats infant death and abandonment by protecting the mothers from this embarrassment. Mothers who don’t want to keep their infants but wish to avoid a face-to-face interaction may place their infants inside a Baby Box.

Each box includes an incubator to control temperature and a sensor to notify emergency staff within 30 seconds of someone placing a baby in the box. EMS picks up the baby within three to five minutes. The organization built two boxes at Indiana fire stations where people can place unwanted babies.

Had Patel known about this resource, perhaps her story would have taken a different direction. But publicity surrounding her case may encourage other Indiana moms to take advantage of a Safe Haven Baby Box.