While she is charged with murder and imprisoned in Florida, a pregnant woman demands to be released. She justifies her request by explaining that her fetus is a person, that he is not accused of anything and that he therefore has the right to freedom, the lawyer for the “unborn child” said Thursday. “The child had no say in the decision to incarcerate the mother,” said William Norris.
In July 2022, Natalia Harrell, 24 and six weeks pregnant at the time according to her court petition, was arrested and charged with murder after fatally shooting a woman while they were both in a Uber vehicle. Natalia Harrell had a gun in her purse and “feared for her life and that of her unborn child”, according to the text filed last week.
“The child has not been charged with any crime”
“The unborn child has not been charged with any crime by the prosecutor” and is “illegally incarcerated”, argues the document, which claims that Natalia Harrell did not receive the care necessary for her status as a woman pregnant in prison. The lawyer therefore requests his release in the name of the habeas corpus procedure, which makes it possible to challenge a detention seen as arbitrary. “It’s interesting to see how the company is progressing,” said William Norris, who was hired by the future father. “People are beginning to recognize that an unborn child is a person.”
This case is reminiscent of that of a pregnant motorist, fined by the Texas police because she was driving in a lane reserved for carpooling, and who estimated last year that her fetus counted as a passenger. She had taken the matter to court. Files which intervene after the Supreme Court of the United States dynamited, in June 2022, the judgment Roe v. Wade which guaranteed the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy at the federal level, leaving this decision in the hands of each state. If it does not result directly from this decision, the request of Natalia Harrell, pregnant about eight months today, is “a consequence”, recognized William Norris.
