What really happened to Purvi Patel’s baby boy?

If you have spotted stories in the mainstream or left-wing media about Purvi Patel’s Indiana feticide conviction, chances are you have been subjected to some serious misinformation about what happened to baby Patel and the evidence against his mom.

A brief background:

• In the summer of 2013 in Indiana, an Indian-American woman, Purvi Patel, discovered she was pregnant with a child she had conceived with a married coworker from her family’s restaurant.

• Patel is from a conservative Hindu family, and she hid her pregnancy from her family until after the baby’s death late in her second trimester or early in her third.  Extramarital sex is condemned by the Hindu values of the family; however, Purvi’s father has since stated that, had he known of the pregnancy, he would have welcomed the child regardless of how the baby was conceived.

• Her father never had the chance to welcome the child, because the baby (a little boy) died somewhere around his 26^th week of life.  A handful of physicians have testified that the age of the preborn baby was 22 to 30 weeks or beyond, but fetal weight at the time of the autopsy indicates that the baby was a minimum of 26 weeks along.

• The baby’s death was discovered after Patel went to the emergency room hemorrhaging from the delivery earlier that day.  She initially denied having been pregnant, but ultimately authorities found the baby’s body inside a plastic bag in a dumpster outside the family’s restaurant.

Now, the liberal media’s spin on the story goes something like this: Purvi Patel suffered a miscarriage and was thrown in jail for something completely out of her control because Pro-Life feticide laws are that outrageous.  Cue the evidence-spinning and abortion lobby pandemonium.

As you may have guessed by now, there is much more to the story than the liberal media have had the integrity to report.  Because doing so… well, would hurt their agenda.  But Pro-Lifers have a knack for discerning facts and exposing the truth, and that is exactly what one Pro-Life journalist did in his excellent rebuttal of the shoddy reporting this story has received.  Calvin Freiburger notes that the media’s spin on the story leaves readers convinced that reasonable doubt should have prevented Patel from receiving the conviction handed down by her jury.  But in Freiburger’s words, media pundits were equating reasonable doubt with “straining-wishful-thinking-beyond-all-credulity” doubt.

Here’s what you probably will not hear from said pundits:  First, evidence of Purvi Patel’s exchange of 52,000 text messages with her best friend during the pregnancy ordeal, although circumstantial, carried heavy weight during the trial.  Patel divulged many facts to her friend during the summer of 2013 that would ultimately shed light on the mysterious death of her viable baby boy. 

The text messages reveal that Patel discovered she was pregnant in June, and shortly thereafter she told her friend that she ordered abortion-inducing drugs without a prescription from an international pharmacy in Hong Kong.  (As an aside, although medically-induced abortion is legal in Indiana, the means used by Patel were illegal.)  Patel’s friend repeatedly urged her to see a doctor, but the mother refused, saying, “I’d rather not even go see a doc. I just want to get this over with.”  Patel continued documenting the saga as the days passed, detailing that the pills tasted “like sh**,” and that if they didn’t “work,” she was “gonna be mad.”  Three days after she started taking the pills, Patel texted her friend: “Just lost the baby.  I’m gonna clean up the bathroom and then go to Moe’s.” 

What happened between Patel delivering her son on the bathroom floor and her trip to the emergency room was not initially apparent, since Patel repeatedly lied about having been pregnant, despite two physicians informing her that the contrary was true (the baby’s umbilical cord was still hanging out of Patel’s body when she went to the ER).  When she finally admitted to having given birth, she lied to police about the location of the baby’s body, initiating a wild chase for the child authorities believed could still be alive.  Patel told police that the baby was in a dumpster outside of a nearby Super Target, but his body was ultimately found in a dumpster outside of the family restaurant.

Patel said that she attempted to resuscitate the baby, who she claimed was not alive at the time of his birth.  Jurors may have found this hard to believe in light of the fact that, by her own text message admission, Patel had intended for weeks to kill the child, and then before nonchalantly heading to work, she discarded his body like any other meaningless piece of garbage.

The baby’s autopsy indicated that he was alive at the time of his birth because his lungs floated when placed in water, meaning that they had been filled with air (which cannot be the case for babies who died in utero).  Consequently, Patel was charged not only with feticide, but also with the neglect of a child.  Utter madness ensued over the dual conviction, with abortion advocates asking how Patel could be charged with both feticide and neglect, reasoning that the baby would have to be born dead for the first conviction and born alive for the second. 

What these naysayers fail to acknowledge, however, is that Patel intentionally killed the child whom she was carrying in her body – the child who had no hope of Life without her cooperation—and that she chose to carry out the baby’s death sentence by herself with full knowledge and intention of what she was undertaking.  That is where the blurry line between abortion and feticide is drawn. 

Calvin Freiburger poignantly notes the insanity of the outrage over Patel’s conviction, summarizing the entire case’s tragic lesson: “More importantly, the fact that society’s fallen so far that we must entertain these compromises in the first place, where we’re splitting hairs over different gradations of killing children, is the point.”