Deja vu: Georgia wants to investigate all miscarriages

A new bill out of Georgia would require the police to investigate all miscarriages to make sure they were “spontaneous.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because a lawmaker in Virginia tried to pull the same shit back in 2005.

Virginia Delegate John Cosgrove (who is creepy for many reasons) proposed a bill that would have required women who had miscarriages to report the pregnancy loss to the police within 12 hours. So basically, in the midst of an emotionally and medically fraught experience, a woman would have had to go file a police report. If she didn’t, she could get up to 12 months in jail and $2,500 fine.

The reason you haven’t heard anymore from Cosgrove and his bizarro bill is because bloggers put a stop to it. That’s right, even back in 2005 when people were still talking about how blogs were just forums for complainers and not platforms for action – we were getting shit done. When Cosgrove asked why we withdrew his bill, he attributed the outcry from the internet: “I’ve never been blogged before. The tone of the e-mails has been disgusting. I was absolutely mistreated on this.” (Yeah, you can imagine how bad we felt.)

So, we’ve done it before – let’s do it again. The bill in Georgia was introduced by Republican Bobby Franklin; all of his contact info is here and pasted below. Please pass it on…

Office number: 404.656.0152
Home Number*: 770.928.0896
bobby.franklin@house.ga.gov

*I normally don’t recommend calling people at home, but this number was listed on the public page for the Georgia House of Representatives and Franklin’s bill would intrude into women’s homes and lives the most personal way…so I think it’s appropriate to post.