Purvi Patel

Purvi Patel (born c. 1982) is an Indian American whose conviction and sentence to 20 years in prison in Indiana for feticide and child neglect was overturned by the Indiana Court of Appeals. The court pointed out that the lower court's ruling had been an "abrupt departure" from the intent of the feticide law as shown by prior usage, which consisted of cases in which a pregnant woman and her unborn child were the victims of violence. The court also said that it was not possible to claim that lawmakers had intended the feticide law to be used to prosecute women trying to abort because the state abortion laws had already since the 1800s explicitly protected pregnant women from prosecution. "The state's about-face in this proceeding is unsettling, as well as untenable" under prior court precedent, Judge Terry Crone wrote in the ruling. The court said that Patel endangered the child by not seeking medical care but that prosecutors failed to prove that her failure to do so resulted in the child's death.

Patel's case had caused international controversy because the overturned conviction had opened the door for any woman who expresses doubt about her pregnancy to be charged if she miscarries or has a stillbirth. If her conviction had not been overturned, she would have been the first woman in the United States to be charged, convicted, and sentenced on a feticide charge. Her case has also been compared to the prosecution of Bei Bei Shuai under similar circumstances. The prosecutor claimed that Indiana's law allows for women to be convicted of feticide for attempting to end a pregnancy even if the fetus survives. The procedure tests the buoyancy of the lungs in the belief that lungs that float suggest that the fetus took a breath, and the lungs in this case did float. The jury in Patel's case determined the fetus had been alive and found Patel guilty of child neglect. On January 28, 2016, the Indiana Court of Appeals agreed to hear oral arguments in the appeal. A three-member panel of judges heard arguments from both sides on May 23.

On July 22, 2016, the court ruled in her favor and specified that the legislature had not intended for the feticide statute to be applied to illegal self-induced abortion, and so it vacated the feticide charge. The court also ruled that while the state had proven that the child was born alive, it did not prove that the child would not have died if she had sought immediate medical attention. It therefore vacated the Class A neglect charge and remanded the case to the trial court with instructions to enter judgment of conviction for class D felony neglect of a dependent and resentence her accordingly. The trial court then changed the sentence to 18 months. She had already served more time than this, so she was then released.