Jailing a mother of three - WTF

She made a mistake in estimating how long she'd been pregnant, that's all. It's something that has no doubt happened before to many women even without suffering the denial of healthcare caused by lockdown and will probably happen in the future to many more women, they'll just be lucky enough to be properly diagnosed. Extrajudicial social media trials like this one are horrific. No woman should ever be imprisoned because she had an abortion.

I think there's a huge danger in these extreme arguments being made, that it pushes us towards a situation more like the US. If you wanted the perfect way to convince anyone who might be a bit on the fence that abortion rights are really about selfish, callous women who aren't prepared to take responsibility within reasonable parameters, then just show them some of the posts on this thread. You run the risk of radicalising whole swathes of the population against abortion if you insist on opening up a conversation and you imagine for one second that most people will be ever cool with zero restrictions up until birth.

There is a very well funded, obsessively anti-abortion lobby group in the US and I would imagine funnelling some money across the pond would be an next obvious course of action. So by all means let's give them an open goal here by talking about babies in utero as parasites with no right to exist who can be 'evicted' for any reason up until the point a woman actually goes into labour. That will definitely not play into their hands at all.

They have a father don't they? Nobody think men should be spared jail when they commit a crime.

If they were going into a foster care placement with no family available then maybe it would be understandable to avoid a custodial sentence.

yi because that will really help won't it. She has three children she should be there for and not in prison. Honestly.

But the example you gave was of a wanted baby. In those cases, the obstetrician would assume that the mother wants to give the baby the best chance that her own health allows.

This would be a different scenario, in which the mother chooses to invoke her (hypothetical, new) right to have her pregnancy ended, regardless of the effect on the baby. Luckily, I don’t think many women would choose this option, but a baby born past 30 weeks and given intensive neonatal care normally has an excellent chance.

Goldencup · Yesterday 21:47
Binjob118 · 12/06/2023 15:56

What about her poor poor dead baby? She lied through the whole thing. Her baby was 32-34 weeks, so completely viable. A line has to be drawn somewhere.
Show quote history

“As early as possible as late as necessary, there's your line.”

No. This case was not “ necessary” it was a deliberate, horrific choice.

BodgerLovesMashedPotato · Yesterday 13:24
You seemed to have missed the point being made which was that pregnancy even for those women that want to have a baby can be difficult and deeply unpleasant. To force that onto women who don't want to do it and don't want to have a child is the point to consider.
Exactly”

Why can’t they consider that before 34 weeks?

If that happened then wouldn’t you have an abortion before 20 weeks? A foetus can be born into a viable baby at 24+ weeks gestation. I will never support late term abortion. This woman who was jailed knew how far along she was and still chose to poison and kill a 30+ week baby rather than give it up for adoption. She would have to give birth anyway at that late stage so absolutely no need to murder it.

Why do you think a woman wouldn't be sent to prison for killing a newborn baby? That's happened many times. And also for failing to protect the baby against a partner who kills it. A case where the woman didn't plead guilty initially would also be treated more harshly, as has happened here

As I said upthread, if she had killed her new born baby she would have been unlikely to have been sent to prison. It makes no sense that a late term illegal abortion carries a harsher punishment than killing a new born baby.

obstetrician would refuse to induce that early because of the harm that the premature delivery might cause to the baby

less harm than killing it first though.

Women's choice up to birth is all we have until we can magically teleport fetuses into men/incubators.

This is not true, up until birth though. Up until viability, yes, removal from the womb will result in death. A 34 week baby could survive outside the womb. There is no magic needed, just for it if it was born naturally, by induction or c-section.

Those who think she should not have been prosecuted:

If the baby had been born alive, and she had suffocated it, would you think she should be prosecuted?

In theory that's OK. In practice, the obstetrician would refuse to induce that early because of the harm that the premature delivery might cause to the baby. I addressed this upthread already.

So, imagine we changed the law, so that a woman could decide at say, 30 weeks that she didn’t want to keep her baby and wanted to end her pregnancy. After a consultant appointment, and taking a few days to think it over, she would be induced/have a c-section at around 32 weeks.

Would that be enough in your opinion,@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia ? Or do you think the woman should still be able to insist on having feticide before the procedure?

How many times do I have to say in this thread that you can hand a born child to someone else (SS if need be) with little if any delay? You can't do that with an unborn child. If someone is so unable to care for their born child that they are considering infanticide, they can call SS. No equivalent "I need rid of this child now, someone please take it from me" mechanism exists for a pregnant woman.

Nobody, in what we would consider to be a “sound mind”, would kill at all

Completely agree

She shouldn’t be allowed to care for her other children after killing their sibling in a horrendous manner.

abortion has legal limits for a reason, she broke that and has rightly been jailed for it. The sentence should be longer.

It’s in the public interest for the same reason that being jailed for infanticide is in the public interest because this is the same thing.

Yes, I'm sure nobody of sound mind kills their born children either. No sentence needed.

I suspect most people would realise how desperate she felt to punch herself in her stomach hard enough to cause harm to the feotus. Its not exactly something someone of sound mind does.

Punching is a particularly aggressive action. Is that acceptable as a form of abortion?

It seems no matter what a woman does, mental health and desperation is used to mitigate anything. It's the trump card to any argument.

Crazy how people can dehumanise a nearly fully baked fetus, it really is.

If a woman punches herself, throws herself down the stairs, sits in baths so hot that they scald her, takes pennyroyal or any other dangerous herbal preparation, or in any other way self-harms to try to self-abort, she needs a therapist not a prison cell.

That you mention self-punching at all tells me that you know full well what desperate measures women will resort to when a safe legal abortion isn't available. You show a stunning lack of compassion for any and all women facing unwanted pregnancy.

I wonder if people would be so forgiving of this woman if she'd punched herself to induce an abortion. No jail time then? Full autonomy and right to do as she pleases?

Since, a fetus is not a person so morals can be tossed aside, after all.

You can decriminalise self-abortion whilst not changing the regulations that doctors work under. Women wouldn't be able to turn up at 32 weeks LMP demanding an abortion because the doctor would refuse on the grounds that he's not allowed to do that. Were she to take matters into her own hands, she would not be arrested.

This would be inline with the views stated by several posters that the woman needs mental health support, not jail. It allows for the "we shouldn't enable that" and "she shouldn't be jailed for it" views to co-exist.

Northern Ireland has decriminalised self-abortion and has fully on-demand doctor-assisted abortion but the time limit is only twelve weeks. It's crazy that NI, home of the DUP, has more liberal abortion laws than the rest of the UK. The rest of the UK's sentencing, up to life, is the most severe in Europe.