Alabama is prosecuting a woman for manslaughter after she was shot stomach while pregnant — but not her shooter

Late Wednesday, AL.Com published a story with a headline that read like a poorly thought-out Onion headline.

According to the news outlet, 27-year-old Alabama resident Marshae Jones was taken into custody after a Jefferson County grand jury indicted her on manslaughter charges. The charges stemmed from an incident between Jones and another woman, 23-year-old Ebony Jemison, in December of 2018. According to reports, the two women got into a fight that ended with Jemison reportedly shooting Jones. Jones, who was pregnant at the time, survived but miscarried her pregnancy. Initially, authorities tried to indict Jemison on manslaughter charges in the death of the unborn fetus. However, after a jury failed to indict her, authorities turned around and charged Jones.

Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid told reporters that “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby,” saying that the fetus was the only real victim of the whole event. “She had no choice in being brought unnecessarily into a fight where she was relying on her mother for protection."

It is hard to articulate how many things have gone wrong in Alabama for this story to even exist. There’s the obvious racism and sexism, the denigration of two living women as not having worthwhile lives at the expense of the unborn. There is the idea that once a woman is pregnant she is only a vessel for creating a baby—any deviation from that plan is criminal because that woman’s sole purpose is to make a baby.

There is also a very real and disturbing legal precedent being set. Does this mean that once a woman is determined to be pregnant, she can be indicted of manslaughter or murder if she has a soft cheese, a glass of wine, or doesn’t have the prenatal bloodwork telling her she has gestational diabetes, resulting in a miscarriage? While not the norm, there are enough woman who do not realize they are even pregnant for long stretches of time that a television series once existed telling those stories. If any of those women had happened to miscarry, would they have been considered perpetrators of “negligent homicide?”

There are scant details of the actual altercation between the two women other than it had to do with the alleged father of the unborn child. Whether the shooting was self-defense, accidental, or whatever is tragic enough without having to further dehumanize a woman. Jones was reportedly brought to the Jefferson County jail and held on a $50,000 bond.