Jailing a mother of three - WTF

I've been called "monster" and "the devil" on this thread and had my words called "chilling" and "disturbing" by people who think that a baby is not a human life until 23 weeks and six days 23:59:59, then one second later at 24 weeks zero days 00:00:00 it somehow magically is a human life with more rights than any other human being because it has the right to use someone else's body as life support.

If multiple people are describing your views as chilling and disturbing, don't you think it's worth considering why? Especially given you admit you have gone from one extreme to another in your views. I imagine you would now agree it's disturbing and chilling to argue that a rape victim should not be allowed an abortion. But you could, and in the past have, made that argument based on what you saw as an inalienable moral principle.

What I and others on this thread have tried repeatedly to explain is that there is more than one principle at stake here. You seem totally unable to give head space to the idea of a balance of rights, but I think you have enough self-awareness to recognise that you're a very black-and-white thinker.

What I would like to really caution you about is where that can lead, especially if it's not tempered by empathy, because we can both agree it's a good thing you weren't in charge of abortion law back then, can't we? Your empathy for the rape victim then was nil; now your empathy for a 32 week old foetus, the equivalent of a slightly undersized newborn, a little girl, is nil.

Arguably your views now are less harmful because thankfully most women would not even contemplate an abortion at 32 weeks plus, but they're no less chilling for that because you've gone from defending the zygote to almost literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and you don't seem to realise that is objectively fucked up. You are saying really fucked up things on this thread, doggedly and repeatedly. You are indulging in thought experiments, philosophising away the simple fact that it is not, and never will be ok to kill a child.

And btw it's not about whether the zygote/embryo/foetus is human. Nobody disputes that. It's the developmental stage and how issues like having a fully functional nervous system, being viable outside the womb, a woman being frankly almost at the end of a full nine months of pregnancy including months in which abortion was available to her, mean that balance of rights has to be recalibrated. Nobody argues that the foetus magically transforms on midnight of the last day of the 23rd week (although it does go through lots of rapid changes at different stages). What the law says is another matter, but that's because you have to draw a line somewhere and there are lots of reasons we've discussed already why it's there in particular.

No you're right, woman do get prison for murdering their baby, I was just thinking about infanticide but you're right, some are charged with murder/manslaughter. That story about the 16 year old living in a caravan whose mum had just died ODing her baby is so sad.

In this case, if I understand correctly, the woman became pregnant in October/November 2019, lockdown in the UK didn’t begin until March 2020. I hadn’t heard of covid until February 2020, I don’t think it was widely reported in the news until then. So she would have had normal access to healthcare for the first 4-5 months of her pregnancy.

I just checked, the baby was a girl. Called Lily.

I meant at what point is it no longer ok to kill a baby?

And as for life support system, this baby didn't need life support. It was going to be born whatever happened, and it was born. The only thing in question was would someone kill it before it was born or not. So by your own logic this was murder because it had no need of life support.

Reading comprehension amongst several posters on this thread, including you, is poor. I didn't dodge your question.

You asked: explain where they think the baby is a human life?

I answered: Zygote. A single cell.

I say again: Abortion isn't about when life begins, it's about women's right to decide what happens to their own bodies

Female babies have no more rights than male babies to use someone else's body as life support.

What of the baby is female? What about that woman's rights?

And you dodged my question. During labour? When the heads crowning?

111 had wait times of over an hour when I called during lockdown.

Also, 111 wait times don't really matter in this particular case.

I'd really like the people advocating extreme late abortions to explain where they think the baby is a human life?

Zygote. A single cell. Abortion isn't about when life begins, it's about women's right to decide what happens to their own bodies, including the right to refuse to have their bodies used to provide life support to a fellow human.

I've been called "monster" and "the devil" on this thread and had my words called "chilling" and "disturbing" by people who think that a baby is not a human life until 23 weeks and six days 23:59:59, then one second later at 24 weeks zero days 00:00:00 it somehow magically is a human life with more rights than any other human being because it has the right to use someone else's body as life support.

I don't think I'm the unreasonable one here.

I just googled and there were two in court for murder on the first page.

If you have post partum psychosis or similar you don't got to prison, if you murder your baby just to conceal it's existence you're rational and will likely end up in jail.

I do think there's a disconnect here.

But I do not think it is in the public interest to jail her. She isn't a danger to society and she certainly isn't a danger to her other children as some posters have claimed with no evidence.

111 was overwhelmed with calls from people who thought they had covid, and often had serious concerns, eg not being able to breathe properly.

Do not rewrite history please.

Health services were largely not accessible. That is a fact. There may have been regional/area/surgery level differences.

Decriminalisation of self-administered abortion, as already is the case in Northern Ireland, would prevent women like this from being jailed, named, etc. It would not mean doctors performing late abortions on demand because the regulations don't permit that.

The issue about women not going to prison for killing a child after the baby is born is a massive sidetrack, untrue and actually potentially quite harmful
The reason why mother's (sometimes) avoid a murder charge is if they were suffering from post parfum psychosis/severe mental illness that puts them below criminal responsibility. This happens fortunately very rarely but it does happen, and has been known about for 100s of years. In is NOT the same as "felt angry/depressed". This applies to all crimes- if a man in the middle of a severe schizophrenic episode kills someone because he genuinely believed God told him they were the antichrist then that's a defense for them to. The only difference is post-partum psychosis usually has an obvious time limit unlike other psychosis

There isn't any evidence this woman was suffering mental ill health to this degree. So it's not relevant.

Women are actively encouraged to abort at a late stage if the baby has down syndrome. Why are those lives less valid?

That's akin to euthanasia and justified because the quality of life of the child would be impaired by medical conditions of unknown severity. It's done in the child's interest. It's a decision that the parents take extremely seriously and is very difficult.

In no way is killing a 34 week fetus because you want to hide your sexual history in the child's interest. By ordering inappropriate medication and lying about it. Not to mention the intentional delay, which could have been avoided.

I can't believe you'd even compare the two.

An example:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12120767/Teenage-mother-killed-baby-son-paracetamol-overdose-jailed-five-years.html

Oh well, if she killed a baby for a house that's all right. Can every homeless person murder to get a house without fear of prosecution?

Abortion in this case was killing the baby and then inducing it. It would have been better if the first step had been missed and she'd simply had the baby induced and refused to take possession.

The poor thing didn't even need her womb any more all she needed to do was not harm it.

I'd really like the people advocating extreme late abortions to explain where they think the baby is a human life? What about the moment its head is crowning? 15 minutes before that? The start of Labour? When both feet are out? When the cord is cut? When?

Infanticide is a child under one, can you really not think of any cases recently where a women has been imprisoned for killing a child under a year old?

They may not be charged with infanticide but there certainly are many cases of women imprisoned for the death of their baby

Well said.

The anti-choice argument is based on the idea that life starts at fertilisation and the baby's right to life trumps the mother's right to bodily autonomy.

No one has ever yet convinced me that life doesn't start at fertilisation. That zygote, that single cell, is the very very start of a human's life. Which is why time limits make no sense. If you consider an IVF embryo to be a really tiny human, your argument for not implanting it into a woman has to be based in something other than "it's the commissioning parents' property".

One of the conditions of legally implanting an IVF embryo into a woman is that the welfare of the child, once it is born and has an existence independent of the mother, must be considered. This is the law, it's in HFEA90. No implantation, no live birth, no child existing independently of the woman's body, no welfare to have to consider.

When making healthcare decisions about pregnant women, the welfare of the child, once it is born and has an existence independent of that of the mother, must be considered. This is why there are certain medications that pregnant women are not allowed to take. This is why women needing to start cancer treatments during pregnancy must abort their wanted babies. This is the same legal principle that governs implantation of embryos under HFEA90, which is why I compared the two: no live birth, no child existing independently of the woman's body, no welfare to have to consider.

With a deliberate pre-term live delivery, there's a live birth, there's a child existing independently of the woman's body, there's child welfare to have to consider. At which point, the obstetrician says "no, I'm not doing that, stay pregnant to full term".

I don't think the law should be changed, I'm not sure really on my feelings around whether it's ethical to send a woman who was clearly in strife to prison for it; I do feel strongly that its cruel and inappropriate for her and her family for her to have been named in the media alongside details of her career and home though.

I read the circumstances here as she had left the father of the existing 3 children and become pregnant with the new chap. Lockdown forced her to move in with someone described as her “estranged ex” from whom she was trying to conceal the pregnancy. Clearly there was housing instability here and then the catastrophic collapse in lockdown in all the wraparound services she might have accessed - presumably she wasn’t leaving the house for antenatal care that could have signposted her to these services as she didn’t want the ex to know about the pregnancy and she had no excuse or reason to leave the house in lockdown.

desperately sad case and the sentencing remarks I suspect don’t even scrape the surface of how complex the situation is. Regardless, a custodial sentence is madness.

If that happened then wouldn’t you have an abortion before 20 weeks?

I'd hope so. But I don't have perfect knowledge of future-me's state of mind. No human does, especially when under stress. Most women think they'd report a rape, yet only 5-10% of rapes are reported. I'd always said that I'd fight back, but what actually happened was that I froze, whimpered "no" and "stop" a couple of times, and started to cry.

I'm in my forties, so future-me would be dealing with perimenopause or menopause. I have amenorrhea caused by my IUS, stopping me from using a late period as a warning. I've never been pregnant thanks to doubling up on contraception for most of my life, so future-me wouldn't know what pregnancy even feels like. So how would I know that my symptoms meant being pregnant and not just menopausal?

I'm autistic and have depression. Some days I don't have the motivation to even brush my teeth. I was meant to go for a dental check-up a month ago and still haven't booked it. If I'm scared of something or know it will be hard, I avoid it terribly. I've had some bad experiences with getting glasses made up and know that the optician exam-to-glasses-to-thesegivememigrainespleasefixthem-repeat process will be an ordeal; I once delayed an eye test for a year because I couldn't bring myself to deal with that ordeal. I've missed job application deadlines (part of my autism is that I really struggle with some types of application question), trains, buses, you name it. I was an hour late for a wedding reception last year because I had a panic attack at the thought of getting a train whilst wearing a skirt thanks to my sexual assault history.

So yes, whilst I hope that I'd magically somehow know that I was pregnant in time when I don't even have periods and would be lucid enough to deal with the referral process and not have a panic attack and end up missing the appointment, I can't guarantee that.

I do not consider myself fit to parent because I can barely look after myself some days, and this is why I double-up with LARC and a condom. Children should be raised by parents who want them, love them, and are competent to care for them. Even if I fell in love with my baby at birth, "doing my best" wouldn't be enough. A woman with my depression and tokophobia should not be put through a live birth only to have the baby adopted, especially as I would spend my life looking over my shoulder waiting for a letter or phone call from the baby. Adopters tend to want children with nice clean bill of health, not family histories of mental illness, suicides, alcoholism, autism, and migraine. My baby would probably be raised in care.

I agree with this.

I don't think it does any good to call people who are basically fine with abortion up to viability anti-abortion/pro-life/forced birthers.
All it does is push away moderate people.

Also, it's only with modern technology that babies can survive if born at 34 weeks.

Not really, our son was born at 34 weeks and had less than one day in the SCBU only as a precaution, just monitored. Born at 3pm on the Monday, and handed over to me on the ward on Tuesday morning, no drama at all, baby handed to me as normal after birth and then taken away for "monitoring". The only "modern technology" was being hooked up to a heart monitor and blood oxygen monitor. I seem to remember some kind of injection being given to develop his lungs, but can't remember whether that was given to me before birth, or him directly after birth. Other than that, it was "just another day at the office" for myself and the midwives/doctors, etc.