The mother was in shock that day in May 2018 as several law enforcement officers, some in tactical gear, stood outside the rural Winnemucca home to serve a search warrant.
“I had a miscarriage, OK? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f**king miscarriage?” Rousseau responded to the deputy.
The single mother, who was already struggling to afford care for her two young boys, was dealing with complicated feelings of ambivalence and guilt about her unplanned pregnancy and stillbirth, her attorney said. Rousseau told the deputies she had been taking large quantities of cinnamon and lifting heavy things while pregnant “to have a miscarriage.”
Deputies walked to a cross that was painted red with Abel’s name written in black on a green plot behind the house, according to the police body camera footage and a police report. They dug up the remains and carried them to a law enforcement vehicle, the report said.
Two days later, Rousseau was arrested and charged with felony manslaughter before she was convicted in Nevada, where abortion is legal, under what legal experts say is a vague and broadly written statute that makes it a crime for any woman to take drugs with the intent to terminate a pregnancy. She was also charged with concealing birth, a misdemeanor, but was not convicted on that charge.
Conservatives are such heartless ghouls. There is nothing they wont arrest and torture women over.
Agreed. I also wanted to note that this happened in May 2018.
Not sure you needed to repeat information from the first sentence of the post but no harm I guess.
Not everyone reads beyond the title.
I wanted to note it because this happened before the repeal of Roe v Wade.
Fair enough, thanks for the elaboration.
You’d be surprised
Agreed. Am I wrong that she did everything possible to induce this miscarriage?
Conservatives. Amirite
What’s wrong with inducing a miscarriage?
Abortion was legal. It should still be legal, but it was legal when she did so.
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Abortion access is political.
Conservatives are the party that enact legislation criminalizing women’s healthcare.
Why are you defending them?
Abortion should be de facto legal until Congress is at least 51% women.
A bunch of old men have no business voting on what goes on between a woman and her doctor. That shit is archaic.
It should be legal regardless of what women in power believe as well.
It’s not an issue for politicians at all.
I don’t disagree. But as long as there’s no equal representation, this isnt politics, it’s patriarchy. And I say this as a cis white man.
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You just had to double down on being a disgusting asshole, didn’t you.
So what? It’s her body not yours.
Deputies walked to a cross that was painted red with Abel’s name written in black on a green plot behind the house, according to the police body camera footage and a police report. They dug up the remains and carried them to a law enforcement vehicle, the report said.
Deputy Mitcham was a familiar face to Rousseau when officers showed up at her doorstep to serve a search warrant because a woman who sometimes babysat her children was a friend of Mitcham’s, according to Fitzsimmons.
In the police report, Mitcham wrote that the woman sent her a screenshot of Rousseau’s Facebook post, which prompted her to check medical records without finding anything “indicating a pregnancy nor any OB/GYN visits.”
At the 2021 hearing, Mitcham testified she was “sad for Patience” because she felt the mother “didn’t have many options. She didn’t have a lot of help.” Mitcham explained she had a 1-year-old child at home and the case “really hit me hard,” adding: “It still hurts me. Haunts me.”
After she was released from prison, Rousseau repeatedly asked where Abel’s remains were being held, and Fitzsimmons told her they were still in custody and they would retrieve them once the case was dismissed, the attorney said.
But it wasn’t until a Washington Post reporter, Caroline Kitchener, went to Mitcham’s home in 2023 to interview her for a story about Rousseau’s case that the mother and her lawyer found out what happened to the remains, Fitzsimmons said.
Mitcham told the reporter she claimed the remains of Abel from a Nevada funeral home and recounted how she told the funeral director: “I’m taking him. That’s my baby,” according to the Washington Post report.
The cop stole the remains from her as well.
Bro what
Yeah this story is insane and it’s driving me wild that no one has actually read the crazy details, but they’re getting more hung up on whether this woman lied about her work history.
She’s not the only woman to be treated this way either.
I don’t understand, then, why you keep pretending that was accusing her of lying when you’ve been told multiple times it was about the bad journalism.
The fact that those men decided to only talk about that one small detail in this entire fucked up story says more than anything.
Not even a passing comment about how terrible this would have been for her to endure. No sympathy, nothing.
Just speculation about how she couldn’t possibly have started working until later than she claimed.
Patience Rousseau, then 26
Her favorite job was working as a taxi driver for 15 years
The article details she started working in her very early teens.
11 is not “teens”.
Before she went to prison, Rousseau’s life was defined by constant change – from the countless times she had moved to the jobs she worked.
At 14 years old, she could insulate a house “better than most men” and assemble a roof in high heels, she said. As far as jobs go, Rousseau has done “pretty much everything,” including bartending, detailing cars and cleaning hotels and Airbnbs.
Her favorite job was working as a taxi driver for 15 years because she could lend a sympathetic ear to passengers when they needed it most.
But on the day law enforcement showed up on her doorstep, Rousseau says she was the one who needed that support.
Oh you don’t understand paragraphs, I see.
It doesn’t state that she started working at 14. By 14, she was a skilled laborer.
I’m just trying to figure out when she’d spent 15 years as a taxi driver, before the age of 26.
26-15=11
15+11=26
Did she start as a taxi driver at age 11, or did she not work as a taxi driver for 15 years? I’m just not understanding the timeline.
I think it was badly worded in the article, I believe she was a taxi driver at 15 years of age.
I think maybe “taxi driver” was her favorite job of the last 15 years. I agree that it’s just badly worded in the article.
It’s just that the sentence before it was talking about the job she had at 14 so figured it was one after the next.
I think that’s what they were trying to say, and it just got garbled.
That’s exactly what the article was saying.
I’m so glad that y’all debated whether she was lying about her jobs. Very worthy of all of our time here.
She was 26 when she was arrested. The article doesn’t say how old she was when she was recounting her work experiences to the journalist.
If she was 26 in 2018 then she is around 34 now. 34-16 =18 years to be a taxi driver. -2 years in prison She could have done 15 years if she had been a taxi driver from 17-now, but who hires 17 year olds as taxi drivers?
Bro have you ever traveled in America? Go to any airport in the country and you will see 15-20 local “taxi” services, a quarter of which run cash/venmo only.
Wish you spent half this energy for the actual bad people in this story instead of trying to prove that the victim lied about her work history.
I would love to be able to afford kids. They really have become a status symbol at this point.
They can also be an albatross around your neck.
It really, really depends.
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Removing access to safe healthcare will make people choose UNsafe healthcare.
Pre-medical cultures used a variety of toxins, for example, that when brewed wrong were extremely risky. That’s where the average American is going with Mercenary healthcare and prison for even mentioning a pregnancy.
If she goes down for it, then her co-conspirators go down too.
Hell the bible even has instructions on how to do it! Luckily for the christofascists, they’ve never read the bible.
True, obviously the system is prone to make people do those things.
Do you not comprehend that all normal options were taken from her?
How were all normal options taken from her?
When abortion is made illegal or inaccessible through state bans (triggered by the Dobbs decision) and birth control options are narrowed by revived federal laws like the Comstock Act (which criminalizes mailing contraceptives and abortion-related materials), women with unwanted pregnancies may self-induce miscarriages simply because they have no legal alternative—not because they prefer an unsafe method, but because safe, legal abortion has been taken away.
When abortion is outlawed, the only thing that changes is that more women die.
Absolutely, but it was not illegal or inaccessible to her, she simply did not know what to do with the other kids during her hospital stay. And to me, this sounds like a very cheap excuse.
Two days later, Rousseau was arrested and charged with felony manslaughter before she was convicted in Nevada, where abortion is legal (…)
Her conviction was vacated. That means it’s like it never happened. They were wrong to arrest and prosecute her.
Rousseau was crying while sitting on the porch steps with her arms folded across her chest as deputies told her they were trying to figure out whether this was a “viable baby that you miscarried,” the body camera footage from 2018 showed.
Then-Deputy Jacqueline Mitcham asked her to estimate how big her belly was, prompted her to demonstrate the size of the baby with her hands, and asked her why she didn’t call 911.
“I didn’t want to get put in the hospital,” Rousseau explained. “Who’s gonna take care of my kids?”
She repeatedly told the deputies she didn’t know how far along she was in the pregnancy and had done nothing wrong. She explained she was just lying in bed when the stillbirth happened.
“Have you given much thought about why that happened?” asked Mitcham.
“Because I did everything I could to have a miscarriage,” the mother replied, saying she ingested cinnamon – which she read online could naturally end a pregnancy. She also told authorities her car broke down a lot and that she had to push the vehicle when it did.
But doctors would later testify there was no scientific proof the actions Rousseau described had caused the stillbirth – a point the judge later cited in his order vacating her conviction.
You could at least read the article.
This does not answer my question. No options were taken from her. She did not go to the hospital because no one would be able to take care of the kids. What an amazing argument to then force an unethical miscarriage.
And things like “I don’t know how old the fetus was” is also on her. a) maybe don’t fuck like a bunny with so many people; b) absence of period minus roughly 4 weeks. That’s the min and max age of the fetus.
The cinnamon she ingested had no part in the miscarriage.
Should she had abandon her kids to get to the hospital instead?
Not all women have regular periods.
You’re clearly misinformed on this topic on several levels. Best to sit this one out with your pearl clutching.
This is such a bad take. I guess I must be 3 years pregnant /s. You have no idea what it is like to be a woman and living in poverty, let alone one that is also a mother and cannot afford another kid. Slut-shaming is misogynistic as well, women are not mechanical clocks and we do not freak out over every missed period. Please reflect on this. The problem is capitalism once again, but you care more about a woman and a miscarriage instead of why she was in this predicament in the first place.
Come on, don’t put words into my mouth. I never did any slut-shaming. You can go fuck all you want, but please do not spread any diseases and do not get pregnant if you can’t afford a kid in the first place. Unfortunately it is not documented why she was getting pregnant. If she was raped? Hell get rid of that fetus. If she was too lazy to use protection? If you do abortion then, it is clearly unethical, no matter what.
Additionally, she clearly knew she was pregnant. So then you clearly know the rough min/max age of the fetus. This has nothing to do with just missing a period every now any then. So how did she know she was pregnant?
Abortions aren’t unethical.
You’re a hypocrite if you support abortion after rape but not otherwise.
You don’t understand anything about women and pregnancy if you think it’s that easy to determine how far along one is in pregnancy.
maybe don’t fuck like a bunny with so many people
This is the weird slut-shaming I was referring to.
You can go fuck all you want, but please do not spread any diseases and do not get pregnant if you can’t afford a kid in the first place
Women cannot control whether they get pregnant or not. No birth control is 100% effective. Even the high percentages you see are ‘perfect use’ and mean for every 100 women, 10 women actually get pregnant with ‘typical use’ while using their birth control (Source). The higher effective ones are things like the IUD and arm implant, devices that are expensive and come with their own risks but are also not 100% effective; although they’re the closest you can get. Women have all sorts of reasons for picking their chosen birth control, some cannot handle hormones at all. Even I’ve been wrecked by various birth controls. You are effectively saying sex is only for procreation and nothing else.
If you do abortion then, it is clearly unethical, no matter what.
There is no reason to judge a woman’s choice to abort as ethical or unethical. None. As in, it is offensive you are suggesting this. Shit happens. Most abortions are not due to rape and even knowing this, it does not fucking matter. The fact you assume she is lazy is atrocious. It isn’t documented why she was pregnant because it’s none of your business!
And no, knowing she was pregnant does not help determine how far along she is unless she had sex and then never had sex again after that and then caught on to her missed period (assuming she has regular periods, I personally do not even before I started birth control). C’mon, please web search this because women are not identical birthing machines.
Some women feel early pregnancy symptoms within a week or two of getting pregnant, while other women may go months with no pregnancy symptoms. Maybe your symptoms are subtle enough that you don’t recognize them. Some women have a cryptic pregnancy, which means they don’t realize they’re expecting until late in pregnancy. According to the Cleveland Clinic, about 1 in 475 women don’t know they’re pregnant until about 20 weeks, and 1 in 2,500 don’t know they’re expecting until they’re in labor. Source
Alright everyone. Form a line. Make sure to ask zr0 for permission before you do any fucking.
Who’s ethics? Yours?
The fetus was incapable of knowing it was gone. It rejoined the void that it came from. Your ethics are rejected.
She did nothing wrong.
She did nothing wrong? By trying to have a miscarriage? By risking permanently disabling a human just because she apparently was unable to go to the hospital to get a proper abortion?
Sure. Nothing wrong here.
Women are allowed to have autonomy over their own bodies.
She was jailed for 2 years for something that was legal.
You have no idea the burden of being this poor and in the situation she found herself in to hold judgment on her.
We are talking about mutilating a human, not about the health implications for her. I couldn’t care less what people do to their own body and I am very pro abortions. But there is a difference between ending a life ethically and slowly take the life away in an archaic way.
Or are you also killing your pets with shovels to avoid vet bills?
No human was mutilated, or could be mutilated.
Many pets are put down to avoid vet bills… every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
Try fighting for real people over possible potential people, you’ll be useful then.
Fetuses are literal parasites inside a woman’s body frankly.
It’s not comparable to killing pets, FFS.
Now it is obvious why you like the idea of forcing a miscarriage with cinnamon, if you call fetuses parasites.
They’re functionally parasites, especially in the first trimester lol. They leech nutrients from their mother’s body.
Abortion is healthcare. Women deserve respect and autonomy.
It’s an herbal abortion if her cinnamon treatment was the cause. if it had worked, it would be a proper abortion.
No human was harmed, don’t you have better things to defend? Try defending people next time. Like the woman. She’s a people.
And if not, she might give birth to baby with low survival chances and constant pain. Obviously now it is cool to defend stone age methods. Enjoy the cinnamon taste I guess.
I wonder why this woman felt she needed to do it this way? Hmmm…
That was a possibility regardless of the cinnamon.
It was determined that she did not induce the miscarriage herself.
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