Can I share some outrage about outrage?

A Facebook friend today (21 Feb. 2011) posted a link to a blog post entitled, "Georgia Legislator Wants To Investigate Miscarriages, Create Uterus Police" at http://blogs.babble.com/being-pregnant/2011/02/21/georgia-legislator-wants-to-investigate-miscarriages-create-uterus-police/

That blog post opens,

    "First the attack on Planned Parenthood funding and now this: State Rep. Bobby Franklin of Georgia introduced a bill in his state last week that, if enacted, would require proof that a miscarriage occurred naturally. If a woman can't prove that her miscarriage"or spontaneous abortion"occurred without intervention, she could face felony charges."

It goes on to quote this paragraph from a post on the Daily Kos entitled, "GA Legislator Wants to Create The Uterus Police to Investigate Miscarriages":

    “Franklin wants to create a Uterus Police to investigate miscarriages, and requires that any time a miscarriage occurs, whether in a hospital or without medical assistance, it must be reported and a fetal death certificate issued. If the cause of death is unknown, it must be investigated. If the woman can't tell how it happened, then those Uterus Police can ask family members and friends how it happened. Hospitals are required to keep records of anyone who has a spontaneous abortion and report it.â€쳌

(http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/17/946257/--GALegislator-Wants-to-Create-The-Uterus-Police-to-Investigate-Miscarriages)

My friend and her Facebook-commenting friends (including me) expressed our outrage at the idea.

I have a tendency to click through on available links, and to try to find out more. I read the Daily Kos post. I looked for other reports via Google, and I noticed that all the Google results that I could find on this topic were recent blog posts, and all were from the outrage end of the spectrum. I could find nothing about the story online in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which made me suspicious.

As near as I can tell, the blogosphere outrage on this story all traces back to the Daily Kos post. Its author, "Irishwitch" is apparently from Georgia, and as she says at the start, "They do this every session in the state legislature here in Georgia. Someone introduces a bill that would make abortion a criminal act."

She spends some time criticizing Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin's contorted legal logic concerning state's rights in reference to Roe v. Wade, which is part of his proposed bill. She posits the problems with criminalizing all abortion.

Toward the end of her post, she makes the statement about investigations of miscarriages and the "Uterus Police" that I quoted above.

I believe this interpretation of hers outstrips the evidence.

The full text of Franklin's House Bill 1 is available here: http://www.legis.ga.gov/Legislation/en-US/display.aspx?Legislation=31965

Looking at the pdf of the proposed bill, and at the existing Georgia law (via LexisNexis), I find that the state of Georgia already has reporting requirements for "spontaneous fetal deaths" (Georgia Code, TITLE 31. HEALTH, CHAPTER 10. VITAL RECORDS, § 31-10-18. Registration of spontaneous fetal deaths):

    >>
    (a) A report of spontaneous fetal death for each spontaneous fetal death which occurs in this state shall be filed with the local registrar of the county in which the delivery occurred within 72 hours after such delivery in accordance with this Code section unless the place of fetal death is unknown, in which case a fetal death certificate shall be filed in the county in which the dead fetus was found within 72 hours after such occurrence. All induced terminations of pregnancy shall be reported in the manner prescribed in Code Section 31-10-19. Preparation and filing of reports of spontaneous fetal death shall be as follows:

       (1) When a dead fetus is delivered in an institution, the person in charge of the institution or that person's designated representative shall prepare and file the report;

       (2) When a dead fetus is delivered outside an institution, the physician in attendance at or immediately after delivery shall prepare and file the report;

       (3) When a spontaneous fetal death required to be reported by this Code section occurs without medical attendance at or immediately after the delivery or when inquiry is required by Article 2 of Chapter 16 of Title 45, the "Georgia Death Investigation Act," the proper investigating official shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall prepare and file the report within 30 days; and

       (4) When a spontaneous fetal death occurs in a moving conveyance and the fetus is first removed from the conveyance in this state or when a dead fetus is found in this state and the place of fetal death is unknown, the fetal death shall be reported in this state. The place where the fetus was first removed from the conveyance or the dead fetus was found shall be considered the place of fetal death.

    (b) The medical certification portion of the fetal death report shall be completed and signed within 48 hours after delivery by the physician in attendance at or after delivery except when inquiry or investigation is required by Article 2 of Chapter 16 of Title 45, the "Georgia Death Investigation Act."

    (c) The name of the father shall be entered on the spontaneous fetal death report in accordance with the provisions of Code Section 31-10-9.
    <<

The only change in reporting required by Franklin's HB1 is that the following is deleted from the end of (a): "All induced terminations of pregnancy shall be reported in the manner prescribed in Code section 31-10-19." This is presumably deleted because "induced terminations" will be outlawed.

Irishwitch linked the proposed legislation in her post, but she either didn't read it very carefully, or didn't understand the language and markings about how the bill would amend existing law. (New language is underlined, language to be deleted is struck out -- has a line through it, and the rest is existing language.)

Conceivably, with abortion outlawed as intended with HB1, investigations of miscarriages that are deemed suspicious might ensue. However, the record-keeping requirement for miscarriages already exists. Such medical record-keeping is of value -- consider its use in examining possible effects of groundwater pollution, for example. It's totally the wrong focus for outrage about this bill.

(Ironically, I noticed one blog comment against the bill from a woman who was pro-life who was wrapped up in the misplaced miscarriage investigation outrage.)

The Georgia House Bill 1 that Rep. Franklin has introduced is probably the same anti-abortion legislation as he has introduced in the past (see this discussion in 2009: http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=537689, and this 2007 article: http://www.lifenews.com/2007/01/10/state-2020/).

I don't deny that he is a "wingnut" with "whackadoodle" ideas (these are popular descriptors in blogs on this topic, and apt: look up some of the other legislation he's put forward), but it really bothers me that such imprecise information as "Georgia Representative Wants To Investigate All Miscarriages" can propagate so rapidly. As of this writing, a Google search on that exact phrase gets 87 results for the past week, 61 results for the past 24 hours. A search on "georgia 'uterus police'" has 17,600 result for any time and 16,000 for the past week.

On February 20, someone added this sentence to Bobby Franklin's Wikipedia entry, with a citation for the proposed legislation:

    "In House Bill 1, a bill Franklin proposed that would outlaw abortion, a provision is included that would require that every 'spontaneous fetal death' have its cause investigated by the 'proper investigating official.'"

Dial it back, folks. Most bloggers link to a source. Take the time to click the links and find the original documents under discussion. If you don't have the time, maybe it's not right to click that Facebook "share" button yet, or certainly to take the time to create your own blog post. There's plenty of legitimate reason for outrage in the world, but it shouldn't be our default mode of operation.

Mudcatters never do that stuff do they?

~ Becky in Tucson

[I composed this lengthy thing in response to my friend's Facebook post, but it really bugs me to think about those tens of thousands of wrong blog posts out there... I have posted it as a note to my Facebook page (where I find already people are only reading the first paragraph and then commenting), contacted one of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution political columnists, put it as a story suggestion to the Daily Show, and have signed up for the Daily Kos because what I really want to do is see if Irishwitch will correct her error. Ironically, according to her Daily Kos profile, she is a librarian.]