Bid in Lords to overturn move to decriminalise abortion for women

@LilyYeCarveSuns

I see one mention of the foetus as a ‘non-parasite’. Where are all the comparisons to a parasite?

As for ‘evicted’, it was in response to a comment of yours saying that the foetus was, at that point, a separate person. I said in response to you, that in that case if it’s a separate person “therefore [it] should be able to be evicted” like any other person non-consensually inside another person’s body.

I’m not sure what’s so terrible about that language use.

So no, no one has been making the argument that foetuses are like parasites or without value, from what I’ve seen – they’ve said that a foetus does not have more value than the woman, nor should it have more rights than her, and they have compared the situation of being pregnant to other situations that result in non-consensual uses of a person’s body. There’s a difference.

As for your issue with the arguments:

The fact is that a dead person does have more bodily autonomy than a pregnant woman, and more right to cause the deaths of innocent people by refusing to allow their body to be used. That kind of discrepancy is important to highlight, as it goes to show that the argument anti-abortionists put forward isn’t about saving lives. Why do you have an issue with people pointing that out?

As for the analogies and questions asked – these were brought up when people were making irrational, inconsistent arguments, and couldn’t seem to understand that they had different rules for one situation than another, despite the breach of bodily autonomy being comparable in both situations.

Analogies and thought experiments are commonly used in discussions to get people to think about the moral framework beneath their decision making. Is it consistent? Is it rational? Is that morality or logic applied evenly across the board? If not, then how is your position defensible (answer: it’s not.)

I have answered every question asked of me, and addressed every major point. So why can’t you do the same? What can’t you answer: what course of action is morally right in a situation where a man will die without sex with a particular woman? Is it because you know that your answer would of course conflict with and undermine the argument you’re putting forward for why a pregnant woman shouldn’t be allowed to abort at any point in pregnancy? I think so.

Re the physical toll : I know this can be unimaginably hard. Again, I support abortion within the previous limits. Carla Foster did have that opportunity, instead she chose to wait until Labour had to happen, one way or another

If a 14yo girl has sex with a 15yo boy, or similar, that is not automatically treated as rape, and rightly so, I think. If an older man has sex with her, it is, again, rightly imo.
Paris Mayo was 13 when she was having sex with a similar aged partner. This is painfully young but doesn't necessarily mean she was coerced, this doesn't seem to have been raised by the defence.

If she had been below 13 it would automatically have been rape whether she consented or not.

Can I clarify : when you talk about hormonal shifts, post partum psychosis : do you mean Carla Foster or Paris Mayo? Or both?

I do know that being a parent to a child with autism can be incredibly hard. But Foster had the option of aborting pre 24 weeks. And by the time she chose abortion, labour had to happen one way or another. She could have asked for an induced labour. She could have refused to care for the baby once they were born and given them up for abortion. These choices are extremely hard too, but they are there, and being in a difficult situation doesn't mean Foster had no option but to make the choice she did.

How is it not rape if the law states nobody can consent until they are 16?

Well it wasn't fully clear. ScrollingLeaves has said she was talking about Mayo, and I thought 'specific case' meant you were also. I understand I misunderstood.

I don't think what happened to Mayo was statutory rape though: I don't think this is a crime here if the partner is similar age, and Mayo was over 13. If she had been under, it would have been different. It's possible she was coerced but we don't know enough to say that.

The case did definitely show that she had been having sex far too young and for whatever reason felt unable to share the news with the father.

I wasn't talking about any case in particular. That you were explains your otherwise-oddly specific set of circumstances offered as an example.

Statutory rape is still rape.

@Shortshriftandlethal doesn’t engaged in good faith. She implied that my views about pregnancy/abortionIs are influenced because I find it “hard to acknowledge the loss of life involved” because of my miscarriages/ectopic.

I agree, I was interested to hear shortshrift's points because I felt like it was the one of the closest points we got to in the thread about justification for an abortion limit part way through pregnancy in philosophical terms, and how feminism sits within that reasoning. I was put off engaging more because of being treated with suspicion about being NB and a sense (perhaps wrongly I don't know) that my posts were being wilfully misinterpreted (although tbf that wasn't only short).

Self-induced late abortions are vanishly rare. There is no evidence that decriminalising such acts reduces the number of times they occur. So, we have two choices: investigate and potentially imprison women who have still births post 24 weeks, or decriminalise late abortions.

Decriminalisation is not innovative, many countries have them. It also doesn't affect the current 24 week limit which providers have to abide by.

On the basis that decriminalisation doesn't disincentivise self-induced late abortion, the only possible justification is that they should be punished.

Even if we consider that they should be punished (I don't) for the overall good for women's autonomy and health, decriminalisation of late term self induced abortions is the right choice.

So in fairness you don't actually understand or can relate to any of the scenarios these women have been through that you find very black and white such as hormonal shifts, post partum psychosis or being a parent to a child with additional needs? Or can relate to the absolute physical toll of pregnancy or birth which may seem simple in an idealised world to have consented to when you have sex but not so much when real world circumstances are complex? Not to say you can't have your opinion but surely you can see how you're being very black and white on a major physical experience a woman has that you don't know how you would personally cope with.

I think the people who would find the former acceptable would not find the latter so entirely unacceptable because in both cases they would be looking at what's in the best interest of the mother.
I think others would view both scenarios as terribly unacceptable.

That's a very unfair judgement imo. People genuinely engaged with your posts multiple times asking you to explain your point that your personal opinion on the abortion limit was actually imposed by nature. You also laid some pretty unnecessary personal attacks on posters who disagreed with you that we resent men or being female or that we must be non binary or support PBs, just really wild accusations rather than engage in a discussion about your point. I didn't see anyone call you conservative or right wing either? Personally I was really interested to hear your viewpoint in full to understand where you were coming from and was quite disappointed you refused to engage and got quite mean spirited if anyone asked a question of you.

@Shortshriftandlethal I do find your last post a bit rich given that you tried to suggest I was non binary because you couldn't distinguish between bodily autonomy and personal autonomy. And that the rationale of absolute bodily autonomy in pregnancy boils down to 'penis envy'.

What I am meaning to say is that I find it hypocritical that abortion pills leading to hypoxia ( suffocation) of the soon to be born baby, or a doctor killing it first with an injection, would be deemed acceptable, but what that girl seen to be unutterably unacceptable.

Of course the latter is not acceptable ( though I consider it to be Infanticide rather than Murder.) I find it deeply troubling however that the former is seen as being entirely different unless it is more or less essential for the mother and/or baby.

She wasn’t raped, and it wasn’t incest. She was just young girl in a dysfunctional family with an unpleasant and ill father.

Her whole pregnancy went unnoticed. Would you not know your daughter was pregnant if you had one?

Hers was a classic case of denied pregnancy and what should have been an indictment of infanticide which has a different burden of proof from ordinary murder.

Instead she was charged with murder by the CPS.
It was only just before the verdict, and a very dodgy psychologist’s report on the basis of a video of her in the police station where he decided ‘she didn’t look upset’ the morning after her night of giving birth and killing the baby, that the judge told the jury they could decide it was infanticide - not that that meant they were instructed in how to understand Infanticide or that the whole trial would have taken a different course from the outset had that been the charge.

If only she had taken abortion pills instead, even at that last stage, or a doctor had carried out feticide prior to administrating the pills.

She was 14 when she did it but, because of covid, tried when she was 19 and treated like an adult who had done it. Just awful.

Denied pregnancy/infanticide has a known correlation. She needed to be put in a psychological institution and treated, not sent to prison.

"And I know lots of people who work incredibly hard for the well-being of children, and towards a more just society generally, who don't share your bodily autonomy absolutism. They're not shouting anything from rooftops - I don't know what you're talking about. I get the feeling you're not really interacting with me, you've got some idea of an Evil Repubilcan Patriarch in mind, and you're in a game of rhetorical point scoring"

I agree. I gave up with this thread some time ago....This has not been agood faith discussion. Other people's posts have been contemptuously dismissed and not even genuinely engaged with. We've been positioned as being either conservative, right wing bigots who don't believe in a woman's right to choose, or even as men. And there has been some unnecessarily personal and really quite 'mean girl bitchiness' going on. I personally expect a higher level of critical thinking and engagement - along with some basic ground rules of respect for other posters.

Not yet - I'm only 20. I want to have kids one day though.
I think it's coherent to say more developed foetuses in third trimester and qualitative different from first & then second. The ball of cells in the early weeks, to be extreme, is clearly different from the well developed near-baby of the very late third trimester.

It might be clearer that they aren't anti choice of they didn't repay the usual anti choice rhetoric and refuse to engage with any of the meaningful replies posters gave them about misogyny, instead like many others on this thread as soon as they're contradictions around redistricting women in some way are pointed out they flip to a different angle, so it went from harm to foetuses being the issue to the intrinsic value of a a fetus all of which can be applied to an early termination.
I disagree with your opinion of England tbh, the majority of the UK when surveyed support access to abortion and don't think it should be an issue of law. What I see as overall antichocie is those who have their own philosophical beliefs that they want to apply to others bodies whether thats before or after 24 weeks..make that choice for yourself in your own pregnancies and stay out of everyone else's. Can you clarify if you've gone through pregnancy or labour?

Exactly this, criminalising late term abortions just punishes more vulnerable women who for whatever reason lacked the wherewithal to avoid getting into that situation in the first place.

I've been reading the threads. I understand you think she had postpartum psychosis- it definitely seems this option was not explored enough in court.

Was she raped though, let alone by her father? I couldn't find evidence of that. Her situation was clearly horrible at home.

I was talking about Paris Mayo.
What a travesty of justice. It is horrendous.

So was the clamouring for her punishment.
It is unbelievably hypocritical.

I see. Wanted vs unwanted playing into doesn't feel right to me. The doctor should try just as hard to save if they're not wanted imo.

What do you mean by 'anti choice' though? Lily appears to suppprt the 24 week limit, no?

If anything but abortion with no limit is 'anti choice' to you, then a large percentage of the English population is.

No one on the thread called a foetus a parasite. A pp mentioned the parasitical-type relationship and I expanded on it to explain why birth is a very hard distinction and easy to legislate around, compared to 'viability' where there is no clear line of distinction at all, it's a grey area. In common parlance the word parasite has a very negative connotation, but in biological terms it simply describes a type of organism that is dependent on its host to survive. It's a neutral term to describe how an organism lives. When I talk about a parastical-type relationship im referencing the clear biological difference in relationship between a foetus in its mother's womb and a born baby. There are scientific papers which discuss the similarities and differences of foetuses/pregnancy with typical parasites.