A 33-year-old woman from Indiana, has been charged with the feticide and fetal murder of her unborn child after she endured a premature delivery and sought hospital treatment.

Purvi Patel faces between six and 20 years in prison for feticide and up to 50 years imprisonment for neglect of a dependent when she goes to trial, currently scheduled for 29 September. She is the second woman in Indiana to be charged with feticide following the prolonged criminal prosecution of Bei Bei Shuai, who lost her baby when she tried to kill herself.

Women’s rights advocates see the decision by prosecutors of St Joseph County, Indiana, to apply feticide laws against Patel as part of the creeping criminalization of pregnancy in America. At least 38 of the 50 states have introduced fetal homicide laws intended to protect the unborn child and in a growing number of states – including Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina – those laws have been turned against mothers.

Lynn Paltrow of the group National Advocates for Pregnant Women said that “once again prosecutors in Indiana are using this very sad situation to establish that intentional abortions as well as unintentional pregnancy losses should be punished as crimes. In the US, as a matter of constitutional law and human decency, no woman should be arrested for the outcome of her pregnancy.”

Kathrine Jack, an Indiana attorney and activist who is following the Patel case closely, said that the state’s feticide law had never been intended to apply to pregnant women. It was initially framed to catch illegal abortion providers, and later expanded to include men who domestically abused their pregnant partners.

“To use feticide charges in this way is bad for public health. Women will become afraid to go to their doctors for fear of arrest,” Jack said.

Legal documents lodged with the St Joseph superior court record that Patel was first charged with endangering the life of a dependent. On 13 July 2013 she turned up at the ER room in St Joseph hospital in Mishawaka, Indiana, bleeding from her vagina.

The court documents allege that she initially denied that she had given birth but later told medical staff that she had delivered a baby at home but believed that it was dead. She said she put the dead body in a bag and placed it in a dumpster behind a local store.

The body of a premature baby was found shortly afterwards in a dumpster at that location.

Police homicide detectives subsequently interrogated Patel and carried out searches under warrant of her home and mobile phone. They allege that they found text messages between the defendant and a friend in which Patel discussed her pregnancy and admitted obtaining drugs from Hong Kong that she took in an attempt to abort the baby.

The two charges that Patel now faces – the initial count of neglect of a dependent, and the new charge of feticide – appear to be legally contradictory. Under Indiana law, a woman can only be convicted of neglecting a dependent if it can be proved that she gave birth to a live baby.

By contrast, feticide requires the baby to have been born dead. Its definition in Indiana law is that the woman “knowingly or intentionally terminates a human pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus”.

Asked about this apparent contradiction, Patel’s lawyer, Jeffrey Sanford, said: “I don’t think the state can prove a live birth.”

In a pre-trial court hearing on Tuesday, Sanford asked for a delay in the trial date to give his team more time to prepare a defence against the new feticide charge.

The contentious legal issue of whether women can be held criminally liable for the outcome of their pregnancies remains unsettled in Indiana law following the resolution of the Bei Bei Shuai case. Shuai, a migrant to the US from China, spent more than a year in jail awaiting trial for murder and feticide following the death of her baby, Angel, who was born after Shuai took rat poison in a suicide attempt.

In August 2013, prosecutors agreed to reduce the charges to criminal recklessness, and Shuai was released from jail on time served having pleaded guilty. The outcome failed to resolve any of the pressing legal and constitutional questions that were raised by the case.

Sue Ellen Braunlin, an Indiana doctor who is co-president of the state’s Religious Coalition for Reproductive Justice, said that the treatment of what happened to Patel and her baby as a criminal matter “feels like an intrusion of law enforcement into the realm of healthcare. This is a distortion of the law.”