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.
Fair.
I was really only confused about the “Her favorite job was working as a taxi driver for 15 years.” Everything else made sense, that just felt like a bad phrasing on the reporter’s part. Other jobs, I was replacing shingles on my family’s buildings at 15, folding boxes under the table for a local bakery before then.
No hard feelings? TBH, I should have disengaged sooner because I felt myself going down the “maybe if I overexplain my stance they’ll agree with me and everyone’ll be happy” rabbit hole, when I should have figured out that we were talking past each other. Like, it felt so… yeah, no, the events in the article are messed up. Clearly if I feel that so strongly everyone else can read my mind and knows that without me saying anything [spoiler alert: people can’t read my mind]. Then I fixated on the detail of the date and you maybe thought that was all anyone in the thread was taking away from the article, which didn’t help anything.
No hard feelings. Thank you for taking the time to see where I am coming from.