Cruelty happens in every profession identified from the manner one combs another’s hair.

Within a month of the five judges’ appointments, the perfect case came before the SCOTUS. 

This case was an appeal of a guilty verdict for child negligence, child cruelty and manslaughter for a 22 year old woman who was serving a ten year sentence. She already had spent four years in the Women’s Federal Prison Camp in Texas. 

She was represented by an appointed defense lawyer who tried his best to defend her, but he failed. He continued to work for her appeal. Soon the ACLU took interest in the particulars of her sentence. They worked through the court system until SCOTUS agreed to hear her case. This would be the first case for the five new judges as part of the SCOTUS and it was the perfect case to revisit the idea of a Federal anti-abortion law.

The case was a manslaughter conviction of an 18-year-old woman whose baby died after seven months of pregnancy. The young woman grew up in the foster care system. She had no real attachment to any of her foster parents. One of her high school teachers took an interest in Jane and tutored her by teaching her that she needed to save her money so that once she graduated from high school, and left the foster care program, she would be able to get an apartment of her own. She was an independent young woman who had started to work part-time at a Denny’s restaurant near her high school. After high school she began working at the restaurant full time.

Jane valued her teacher’s advice and once she got her independence and a secure place to call her home, she began saving for tuition to go to design school and to study fashion design. She wanted to be a clothes designer. She had learned to use a sewing machine on a Singer sewing machine with a manual foot pedal that one of her foster homes had owned. She would go to GoodWill and buy clothes made of expensive materials for little money. She would take the Good Will clothes apart and use the material to create clothes for herself. She spent much of her free time alone creating fashion.

She was self taught and her first purchase after saving money for first and last deposit on a one room garage apartment, was a sewing machine. She recreated her wardrobe using clothes from GoodWill, and she dreamed of the day she could attend design school and become a fashion designer. 

Her garage apartment was basically one room with a ¾ bath and a wall with a counter and a top row of shelves with a sink and small stove below the shelves. A small refrigerator and microwave oven completed the kitchen.

Jane was eighteen-years-old and now independent of foster parents and the social services that had chosen her foster parents for her since she was small. At the restaurant, she was soon promoted to lead waitress and worked six days a week. Eagerly learning new skills and responsibilities, she excelled in her duties. Her bosses, a husband and wife team, who were also the owners, were pleased with Jane’s responsible attitude and hard-work.

Jane was happy in her independence and wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, but that’s when you’re sure to meet someone. Kevin was one of the distributors of produce for the restaurant. He delivered fresh fruit and vegetables three times a week. Soon Jane and Kevin began dating. Soon they became lovers.

Jane was very clear with Kevin that condoms must be used when they became lovers. Since Obamacare was canceled by Trump, Jane had never been to a doctor. She insisted that Kevin wear a new condom with each intimacy. She was adamant, even though Kevin felt that sex felt so much better without a condom.

Jane was eager to start her education so she began taking some evening adult-education classes in basic sewing and pattern making at the technical college. Jane loved the classes, loved every part of pattern design. She started carrying a small sketchbook and would try to draw clothes that she liked, imitating clothes she saw on the street. Then she began drawing new fashion from her imagination. 

As Jane grew more confident through her evening classes at the Technical College, she realized how happy she was with the direction of her life. Growing up in the foster care system, she was never alone among her many foster siblings. Often forced to share her bedroom, she loved the solitude of her apartment. Her waitress job and her evening classes kept her busy. She had a plan and a desire, faithfully putting money away for tuition. Someday she would be on Project Runway, and would win all competitions to go on to fashion week in New York City. One could win $250,000 plus a fashion show, the best sewing machines and 3-D printers, other supplies and equipment, tutoring and connections with designers who would guide her in starting her own business. She would close her eyes at night and imagine all the clothes she would design.

Kevin started showing up at her evening class at the end of the night. He stalked her when she was on campus. At first, Jane was flattered for his attention, but more and more, Kevin became sure that Jane was seeing someone in one of her classes. He became jealous and domineering. He started timing her return from class at night. Kevin was sure she was seeing someone else. 

He started to pick fights, or insult her with small frivolous innuendos that she wasn’t so talented. She was, afterall, a foster kid with no particular design sense, pointing to her stacks of salvaged cloth from Good Will. He started showing up at Jane’s garage home, just dropping in to see if he could catch her with someone else. One night he broke the lock on her door and let himself in, and waited for her to come home.

That night, once she arrived home from class, Kevin was convinced that she was cheating on him. They argued. Kevin got physical, pushed her down on her mattress and forced sex without a condom. 

“Get out of my house, and never come back.” Jane screamed through her tears.

Then Kevin left Mt. Pleasant, Texas, never telling her where he was going and she never tried to find him. She was relieved that he was gone. She paid her landlord for the replacement lock. He warned her that if she had another incident where something was broken, she would have to move.

The biggest mistake that Jane made was saving her tip money in her apartment. She hid it in a cracker tin in the back of her metal cupboard she used as a pantry. Never did she worry as she lived alone and except for Kevin, she had never invited a friend to visit.

Kevin was gone and Jane was glad. Kevin was an interruption. She was back to her independence and she focused on her growing duties at the restaurant and her evening classes at the technical college.

At first, Jane thought she had a virus. She’d start the day by vomiting. Smells could turn her stomach. While serving a customer, the scent of a customer’s perfume, or sometimes the smell of what she was serving would cause her to rush to the bathroom. 

She couldn’t get past the morning nausea. It began to interrupt serving anything with seafood. A sauce she had served a hundred times, became impossible for Jane to approach a table and ladle it upon the main entre. She once almost vomited on the plate she was trying to serve. Even the fragrant bouquets that the owner would display on the tables would leave Jane heaving.

Jane stopped eating before work in the effort to stop vomiting. One afternoon shift she fainted and an ambulance took her to the hospital emergency room. After some preliminary tests the doctor informed her that she was pregnant. Not only that she was pregnant, the doctor told her that she had a condition that required her to stay in bed during her pregnancy to improve her chances of carrying the fetus to term. He emphasized that there was no other option to improve her chances for normal birth.

Jane had no medical insurance (Trump had revoked Obamacare, with no replacement) and when she received the bill for her emergency room visit and for the lab tests, the costs were almost $7,200. Another $1,400 was charged for the ambulance ride to the hospital. She decided that she had to continue to work as long as she could because there would be more bills to pay for her delivery when the baby was born.

Jane tried to work. She still felt sick to her stomach by certain foods and it wasn’t long before the owners told her to stay home permanently. She lost her job and after paying her emergency room visit and the ambulance, she had enough money, including her last month’s payment, for two more rent payments.

Since she could no longer work at the restaurant, Jane tried to make a plan. She needed to work to keep her apartment. Her body was changing, and she didn’t have a mother image to rely on to tell her all the ways her life would change as well. 

She never desired to be a mother–ever. Life had been so difficult through her childhood in foster homes. She didn’t remember anything about her biological mother. Either parent, for that matter. She had been a foster kid since before she could remember. She had no stories about her biological parents to tell her child.

She never wanted to be a mother. She had tended so many foster children younger than herself throughout her years in the foster care system. She never tried to make money babysitting. She felt helpless with babies. She could remember many nights at one foster home where she shared a room with a six-month old baby girl who never slept through the night.

Jane’s first concern was getting a job that she could do from home. She didn’t have a laptop, or wifi service in her garage apartment, so she decided to go to the Titus County library and search for jobs on the internet. She had her cellphone. Perhaps Mr. Hobbs, her landlord, could be persuaded to include her on his wifi program. She would ask him without worrying him by telling him that she had just lost her job and was pregnant.

For the next seven weeks, Jane would go to the library and spend the day looking through the internet postings for work that an 18-year old teenager could do while three months pregnant–there was no way of hiding her pregnancy any longer. She was growing bigger everyday.

When at the library Jane would try to find an unobtrusive corner desk among the library stacks that was rarely busy. The religion section was one of the best locations in the library for scant traffic and few intrusions. Not many people were interested in dusty manuals about ancient religious text with infinite footnotes and bibliographies. Many afternoons, Jane would sit in her favorite cubby in a quiet, no trafficked corner of the Hebrew reference section for hours. Just sitting. Her eyes got so tired from scouring the want ads. Sometimes she would cradle her head on her hands folded upon the desk’s laminated surface into an ungloved hand pillow and fall asleep. 

Jane had no idea of what would happen once she delivered the baby. Most days she tried not to think about her future. She had nothing to offer her child but to repeat her cycle of life, providing no happy future fairy tale for mother or child. She had no idea how to begin to create a safe home for this little person. She had never dreamed about becoming a mother. She had no idea how children birthing children could comprehend how to begin to create financial security that would sustain both of them.

Still she had her tip stash. There must be at least $3,000 that Jane had once saved for her future–tuition for design school. Now Jane had decided that her tip money would be for when the baby came, and she needed everything–things she would never be able to think of until the baby was here.

One early September afternoon at the Titus County Library, Jane raced to the bathroom and left her cubicle desk unguarded. She suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She rushed to the women’s restroom without gathering her things. Her coat and backpack were draped over the back of the desk’s wood chair.

More and more often Jane found herself in new physical states of misery. She lived on saltine crackers which she could find free on returned dinner trays at McDonalds, unopened saltine packets, discarded and piled up for the lunch staff to collect. Today nothing could squash the acid taste of regurgitated stomach bile. She sat on her knees on the moist  linoleum bathroom floor, her face peering into the toilet bowl. Alone, she wept in despair.

If not enough sorrow could touch her that day, when she returned to her cubicle, her backpack and her only warm coat were gone. In her backpack were her sketchbooks, a list of businesses she had applied to by website for work, her hat and gloves, and her striped sweatshirt with a hood–one of the few clothes she had that she could still wear. Her coat had her house keys in the zippered compartment inside the hidden pocket with her cellphone.

When she returned to her desk and realized that her things were taken, she got down on the floor and crawled under the desk of her cubicle, pulling the chair close until it hid her and her belly. And, inconsolable, she cried. Not loud guttural weeping, but silent tears that sounded over time like a whimpering puppy the first time he was left alone. 

The janitor found Jane asleep under the desk after the library had closed for the day. The janitor called the police. He reported her with the innuendo that she was a vagrant, probably a drug addict, or something worse. One could see that right away as she had no purse, no identification, no house keys, no coat. “Damn streetwalkers. And she’s pregnant.” The police held her in jail overnight. 

The next day her garage apartment was raided. The police broke her front door with a sledgehammer. They found no drugs even though they broke holes in the drywall, broke dishes and pulled the pantry cupboard off the wall. They tore up her fashion collection looking for drugs sewn in the seams. Every drawer was turned upside down. They punched the drop ceiling, the partitions bent and broke with ugly holes dripping cardboard fuzz. 

They had pried apart her sewing machine. It lay on the floor in pieces. Nothing was left as she had left it. Everything of value had been destroyed. None of the police remembered finding any money.

They never found anything stronger than Midol in her medicine cabinet, but her money was gone. The officers agreed among themselves—there wasn’t any money. She later found her cracker tin with its metal top bent, no longer able to fit on its base.

By evening, her landlord kicked her out of her apartment, keeping her deposit and her last month’s rent to cover repairs. What clothes and personal items that weren’t destroyed by the police, she carried out in a plastic trash bag. Her cotton blanket was still intact, but her pillow had been knifed. Feathers blew in soft swirls dancing over the floor. 

She had no winter coat and just a handful of crackers in cellophane wrappers to eat that night. She started walking towards the strip mall. People had told her that sometimes one could get inside the old Sears building if you shimmied the last door on the receiving dock. Soon she took out her cotton blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders and around her belly–a new fashion statement. She smiled to herself, then shivered, pulling on each metal door handle on the old Sears building, hoping for some good luck. 

Jane managed on the streets for about three months. She was now almost seven months into her pregnancy. The weather was getting harsh, sometimes below freezing. Weather was no longer predictable. Somedays the sky would be sunshine, then in a matter of hours the temperature would drop below freezing. Winds picked up the icy edge of the winter from the North. Some days were more like Canada, then Texas. 

Sometimes Jane could get a bed in the women’s shelter, but it was sometimes more dangerous in the shelter, then on the Sears loading dock at night. Some women staying there were mentally ill, and would physically fight to get her trash bag of personal items away from her. So she improvised housing. She never found the unlocked door of the Sears building, but the receiving dock provided a roof cover, if one positioned their sleeping bag–or the collection of cardboard shipping boxes positioned as a makeshift bed with canopy, in the eastern corner by the rollup door as a bedroom for the night.

Her checking account was closed out. What money she had she kept in her shoe and used it for emergency food. She started to visit the dumpsters behind Denny’s restaurant at night. She did not want to be seen by the owners, or any of the other employees. Often she was able to retrieve table scrapings that were still edible and nutritious. She began to depend on the dumpster for all her meals once the restaurant was closed and staff had gone home for the night.

When winter hit, the streets were frozen with frost on the cement surfaces. The dock, even with cardboard boxes to protect her, was too cold to stay through the night. Jane began to use the County library as a safe refuge out of the cold. She would spend most of the day sitting at a secluded cubby, sometimes reading. Sometimes she rested with her head propped on her hands with wrists bent under her chin, as though she was absorbed in reading a book.

Coming into the library after being outside all night, Jane counted on the women’s bathroom to wash herself and maintain some level of comfort, washing her hands and face under the weak faucet of tepid water. Sometimes she would put her head under the sink tap and try to wash her hair using the dispenser soap. Jane had always preferred to dress tastefully in clothes she had made. A fashion designer must always give the appearance of distinction. Lately, the clothes she had that she could wear she wore for two, sometimes, three weeks without changing.

She kept her head down, never bothered any of the library staff. She rarely, even talked to another person. She felt like a non-person. Her body continued to swell. Her t-shirt stretched over her belly. She hunched over, hoping to be invisible, as her body still betrayed her. She felt so uncomfortably big, yet physically weak. She stayed quiet, stayed away from other homeless people who tended to make a lot of noise while visiting the stacks until they would get themselves escorted out by library security. She tried not to be noticed or draw attention to herself from anyone.

One wintry night Jane found an empty bus stop covered bench with three-sided plastic walls and plastic top. The library was closed and she had already stopped at the Denny’s trash bin—she had nearly eight hours before the library opened, so she just sat down bunkered in the plastic walls for windbreaks and she fell asleep. Eventually, a bus appeared. The driver saw Jane sleeping in the cold and called it in to their dispatcher. He called the police to pick her up.

The police took her to the emergency room—their reasoning was the possible chance of frostbite, and that she was very pregnant with no identification. The emergency room doctor was the same doctor she had had when she fainted at work. The doctor called the Sheriff and asked him to put her in jail until she birthed, for the unborn baby’s sake. Afterall, a jail cell would be safer than living on the street.

A week later, Jane went into labor in her jail cell. The baby was alive only for a few minutes after birth. The doctor blamed Jane for her baby’s death—if she had followed the doctor’s advice, she would have carried the fetus to term, her baby would likely have lived. Both the doctor and the Sheriff blamed Jane for the baby’s death. She was charged with child neglect, child endangerment and manslaughter. It was Jane’s fault that the baby died–she had not followed doctor’s orders to her just six months ago. They were going to make an example of her. 

Jane has been in prison now for four years.

Convicted of manslaughter, Jane now lived in a prison cell with three other women. Jane had one of the top bunks. She had lived for four years now being told when to get up, when to eat, when to sleep with lights on or off. Some of the women prisoners had jobs while in prison. Two of Jane’s bunk mates worked in the laundry.

When Jane discovered the prison library, she began to heal. She became a voracious reader with a paperback dictionary beside her pillow so that she could look up the meaning of words she didn’t know. Words made stories and stories taught about a life where one could design one’s own redemption.

See Jane read. 

Books had become her mental universe. The characters in each book became her friends who lived among the stacks where she could visit during open library hours. The prisoners came and went, but her comrades in the paperback world were her staunch allies which she could return to again.

Even though her lawyer and the attorney from the ACLU kept bringing her case up for appeal, Jane had no fight left to dream of returning to the free world. Her sentence would scar her reputation for any prospective job, or her application to school once she was out.

Wednesday afternoon. Washington, D.C.

(The Honorable Judge Jonah Levine’s chambers)

After the SCOTUS “Personhood” ruling was announced to the World, the five new judges met in Judge Levine’s chambers for a toast between them on the success of their first case. They all hoped that they had brought the end to child poverty in the United States and that their ruling would reunite the Nation in common cause: that in the United States, all persons should be birthed and should be financially secure with a loving home, a safe public vetted education and stability in daily life while still a child and until his/her eighteenth birthday. 

Then they held their glasses high to toast Donald Trump, and they started laughing. Laughing until their sides ached.