Jailing a mother of three - WTF

My heart goes out to anyone having a termination for medical reasons. I know that many TFMRs prevent a fetus with a life-limiting condition from ever suffering. And I’ve read of equally heart-breaking cases in which women had little choice but to end their pregnancies in order to start urgent cancer treatment.

I don’t think it’s right to terminate a (presumably) healthy fetus very late in pregnancy unless there are serious medical reasons. I can understand a woman not wanting to be pregnant anymore and requesting an induction or C-section, but I don’t agree she should have the right to ensure her baby is stillborn. A full-term fetus is more than a potential human being - it’s already a sentient human infant.

Being a mother doesn't mean you are above the law. I can't kill someone and then expect not to receive a prison sentence because well, it would be sad for my kids....Jesus.

The baby was eight months though. I don't think we are talking about a foetus.

In response to "So women who have children should never be sent to jail?" And other similar comments.... Court is already required to consider the impact on children when sending a primary career to prison. Doesn't mean they won't ever go to prison but it's a well established legal requirement that the impact on children must be factored into sentencing.

For my part, I support a woman's choices right up to birth. It doesn't mean I find those choices easy or comfortable. The alternative seems dire for women - where would it stop.

My opinion is that she should have been. This was a premeditated decision, involving deliberate lying and took place over an extended period of time. She had a number of opportunities to either prevent the pregnancy or abort it. Legally. She chose not to take them.

A lot of commentators seem to have gone on autopilot with this case. It will, for example, stop women being honest with their medical advisors … she wasn’t open and honest, she lied through her teeth to get the drugs. Or that access to abortion is essential healthcare … except the problem is that she had access to legal abortion for months.

From your other posts, you’re choosing what I’d call a mechanical cut-off point between ‘foetus’ and ‘person.’ Inside the womb, there’s no ‘person’, just a biological object that a woman has an absolute right to terminate and has total control over. Outside the womb, there is an independent person.

The problem with that is that biology isn’t mechanical. It doesn’t have strict cut off dates and we can’t really predict the exact date of a natural birth. There’s a point at which you can argue that we’re talking about a bundle of cells and there’s a point at which you can say the foetus is doing everything inside the womb it would be doing outside - except breathing, and it could manage that with a little help. Which point? It’s not exact (and may never be).

It’s difficult to argue we should be able to destroy a foetus because it can’t breathe independently whilst simultaneously providing assistance to adult patients who can’t breathe independently…

The current legal compromise is 24 weeks if both mother and child are healthy, or if any complications are treatable. Before that, the foetus has a poor chance of survival without its maternal life support system. After 24 weeks, it does … and that’s the point where we currently start balancing the rights of two people to their respective lives.

I cannot understand why so many people are expressing sympathy for someone who murdered a viable unborn child. So many babies are born under 30 weeks and live. I wonder if the poor baby suffered a lot due to her actions and I wonder how her other children feel about their mother killing their unborn sibling.
Mumsnet doesn’t reflect reality because I don’t know anyone in real life who would be sympathetic to a woman who attempts to abort a baby at over 32 weeks.
The judge got it right and the woman deserves her sentence. I feel so sorry for that poor baby and all the attempts to say that it is legally just a foetus may be technically correct but are morally disgusting

She killed a baby! A baby is pretty much fully developed at 30 weeks and this baby was 32-34 weeks when she killed it. It could’ve survived outside the womb. It was hardly a clump of cells. I know someone who was born at 28 weeks!

'abortion' at 30-something weeks is just not on, that's a universally held view, not in the single liberalest European democracy etc is it even nearly legal, it's miles away from it.

i say that as someone who would be the first on the barricades if the UK ever took even a first baby step towards US style anti-choice restrictions.

mothers should only be going to jail if they've committed an exceptionally serious crime which, very sadly here in a case in which the were no winners, this regrettably absolutely was.

Pregnant women can take whatever they like.

You think that children who are raped who will die giving birth should be forced to give birth anyway.

Why are you on the feminism board when you clearly despise women?

OK, what about deliberately administering a poison to the fetus intended not necessarily to kill but to harm?

No, the law shouldn't be changed.

Killing means "an act of causing death, especially deliberately." Is that not what she did?

As the English language is commonly used, it's both a "fetus" and a "baby" / "unborn baby".

I think "baby killer" language is more of a moral question rather than something you can answer by looking up definitions.

I doubt anyone here thinks it's a good thing but how do you imagine that should be policed? Any woman of legal drinking age up to roughly age 60 in theory could be pregnant at any time. Should all women in that age bracket not be allowed to purchase alcohol just in case?

There's a reason why many women are really cautious about even the difficult cases, the unpleasant cases leading to laws that start to infringe on what women are allowed to do.

She's not a baby killer you absolute weapon

She will need to be segregated for her own protection. Baby killers are not treated well.

It may not be illegal in the UK, but that hardly means it isn't very seriously wrong, or that the law shouldn't be changed.

cyncope · Today 21:35
MrsSkylerWhite · Today 21:22

cyncope · Today 21:13

I do believe that pregnant women should have total power and control over their body including a being inside them”

Agree, until that “being” becomes viable.
If the child had been born alive despite her mother’s very late intervention and she had immediately killed it, she would be looking at a very long sentence.

There are limits for good reasons.

“So the line is, breathing outside the womb.

"Viable" is a little meaningless”

It wasn’t when we believed we were losing our son at 23 weeks. That was the term used as the time by medical professionals , that he was not yet considered “viable”
thank providence he hung on and is now 20 and 6ft 4.

Yes, absolutely, breathing outside the womb. That’s not a foetus, it’s a child.

The lying to knowingly get and take the pills is where she lost any sympathy.

before I read the article I presumed she had made a mistake by a few weeks I.e 12 not 10 and was ready to 100% support her. But she knew what gestational age range the pills were for, she had googled it, and how to abort a 30 week old fetus. She knew exactly what she was doing. To then say she’s traumatised by seeing the babies face…what did she expect?

the fact she is a mother should also make no bearing on her sentence. Many mothers are jailed daily so are fathers.

They are able to. There's no law against it? I'm sure some women do.

I understand what the current law is, I just disagree with it. It has lead to a woman being jailed who in my opinion shouldn't have been.

You didn't answer my question.

So the line is, breathing outside the womb.

"Viable" is a little meaningless.

That’s rather an extreme version of ‘not a person until born’. Reminds me of a science fiction story where the ‘personhood’ definition was ‘starting school’. Well, why not? Women should be able to decide that parenthood was a mistake, for any reason and at any point.

(Let’s just say quite a lot of ‘terrible two’s’ went down the disposal chute.)

The current law, imperfect as it is, tries to distinguish between viable and non viable. A pregnancy that threatens the mother’s life is not viable. A severely disabled foetus is probably not viable. When the law was passed, 24 weeks was the limit of viability. Personhood was effectively defined as ‘able to survive with the same kind of NHS medical intervention we’d give to anyone’.

A healthy foetus of 32 to 34 weeks old was entirely viable - this was a crime, just as an infanticide of a newborn would have been a crime.