The Case of Purvi Patel and why Reproductive rights are Human rights

Recently an Indian American woman Purvi Patel became the first woman in history to be charged and convicted of child neglect and foeticide, which to begin with is a irony of idiosyncrasy. She faces a 20 year sentence with a six-year sentence for foeticide which will be served concurrently.

The Purvi Patel Case
The case for the starters is a a butt of jokes for the state of Indiana, convicted her for killing her unborn foetus and for abandoning a living one. How can both these incidents happen simultaneously and in cohesion? 
The state that held her guilty is one of the most religious states of America which has a strong anti-abortion stand and recently passed the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" that discriminates against gays. No wonder, that's why to hold the holiness of its views on anti-abortion, two impossibly different cases were framed against her.
She was accused of having induced the abortion by consuming abortion pills which she had ordered online, which was further confirmed by laying hands on the text messages she had sent to her friend. She described the taste of the pills in the first one while in the second message she informs her friend of having lost the baby. On the other hand, toxicologists couldn't find traces of the drug in her blood or that of the foetus. A contradictory spate of events that do nothing to prove that she had indeed, induced an abortion and killed the foetus. While on the other hand she was slapped with charges of child neglect, arguing that the foetus had been born alive. A "lung float" test in this case was used to prove this charge, which can't be taken as a concrete evidence. It's only Purvi who is the sole witness to the fact that whether the foetus was dead, or did she give birth to a premature living child.
The ironies here are that a charge of foeticide requires a dead foetus while the charge of neglect of a dependent requires a live birth. Either ways if she has to be convicted it has to be one of the two.

Mumbai, 11th March, 15.10

To drive past this city is homecoming.
Welcomed. Unintended.
21 degree celsius. Summers don't shiver
underneath bare neem trees.
The street is a molten river
gurgling an old song
carrying rust and residue of metal automobiles.

It hasn't rained
since I went. Parched tar gapes its mouth.
Chatrapatti Shivaji terminus
She looked like an enchantress that evening.
Today she is an old woman
beaming ear to ear at the city 
that walks past her. Will someone pay heed?
Her eyes well with tears. Careful, lest they spill.

I stare at the swelling suburbs
that once spelled my name. 
Old famished brick buildings jeer at me
I feel like a princess trapped in a cage.
Escape. Exhale. Exit.

Once More

Rain is my first love
flailing over molten memories
dripping like wax on my skin
it burns.
Light years expand between us
as clouds copulate with the womb
of the earth.
Coiling in the songs of
the pattering petrichor
I've seen you simper
like a five year old boy
to this day, you are the first prayer
of the pluvious.

Killing an Old Lover inside my Head

This rectangular cot of wood
is my world tonight.
As I lie counting the stars
curtained across a glass window.
each a tiny speckle
threaded in the patchwork
of the wild blue yonder
that changes colors
like my body that loves to play with
fire and ice. Normal is passe.

Moments

Only if moments were objects,
that you can hold
name and own.
Like that moment when
your eyes sunk in hope
rotated across the circumference of earth
yearning for a glimpse of me,
while I stood at the corners of a square room
grinning like a cat.
That moment when I drowned myself
in your brown eyes
hiding myself from the iridescence
of city lights.

In August

In August ache was ageing on bare peepal trees

picked by the pointed beaks of notorious crows 
that took shade on a hot summer afternoon

In August you visited friends living in countries
with strange names

while I confided in strangers

whose names I tried and memorise.

Home maker

She complains in monosyllabic matters
by making music with
panting pots and clinging cutlery,
imposing self imprisonment
in an old ancestral home
she has been running after a mouse
for wifing a house.

She bared bleeding bones
to give babies
bickering in sealed spaces
and open streets
voicing her cross swords
she stutters and walks
on a nameless street
each day, every day.

Curling in the First kiss

It feel like water colour spilling 

on white washed walls

it's like being hunted down

by an army of love hormones

like a burst of your musk

thawing through my skin

butterfly wings flaying on the

velveteen skin of a rose

Breaking the bread with you, last time

English breakfast was a word
660 minutes later,
I was sieving seconds
collecting hours in white china cups
sugar seeping into my tongue
melting into the silence of my mouth
The city was smelting in sounds
waning woefully in the dirt
 flashy flourscent lights stared into my eyes
as human life fiddled with speed
on half lit roads.