Mum sentenced to 28 months in prison for abortion pills

[mumoftwobarnyboys]

Used after the cut off point of 10 weeks.

Regardless of how far gone she was, surely this isn't right?

It is her body, despite me morally really thinking what she did was very wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/12/woman-in-uk-jailed-for-28-months-over-taking-abortion-pills-after-legal-time-limit?CMP=twtgu&utmmsource=Twitter&utmmedium=&s=08#Echobox=1686577294

I mean, it quite clearly isnt murder, as reflected by the offences she was charged with and convicted of.

Honestly I have a lot of sympathy with her situation.

Maybe I'll be flamed for this but with my last child I got pregnant very, very accidentally. I didn't want it. I was desperate to miscarry. I spent the whole pregnancy hating myself and the baby. I wanted a termination but it was a COVID and I couldn't access the services, and my DH desperately wanted the baby. It was all a complete shit show. I cried at every scan showing a healthy baby.

I had a supportive DH, family, friends, colleagues, midwife, and at about 20 weeks a psychiatrist who got involved. I had previously good mental and physical health, money, and managed to get through until the birth. Even the morning she was born I was sitting wishing I'd wake up from the nightmare. I was absolutely broken.

All of the above bearing in mind I'd had infertility and IVF for my previous children. My reaction was absolutely insane and extreme and I wasn't myself. It was hell on earth, I considered ending my own life and the baby's.

Change any of the circumstances and I can understand that you'd be driven to utter desperation. I think until you have been through it you just can't understand. Before I had that experience I wouldn't have understood, I'd have been angry and upset.

Then I’m happy not to be fully pro choice. Aborting a baby that late is abhorrent (unless for very narrow medical reasons).

Yes, it’s desperately sad that someone might not want to be pregnant. But killing the baby once it is pretty much fully developed shouldn’t be on the table.

Well I judge her, harshly, and I never said I was "fully pro choice"

I agree. I'm even more furious that she'd already done it 8 years earlier and thought it would be ok to do it again!
Reading judges comments and seeing all the lies she told to so many health professionals looking after her makes me angry too. The ambulance staff didn't need to walk into that situation blind. To have to try and fail to resuscitate a tiny baby. She is expected it to go as smoothly as the last time. When 'the body was never recovered'
I don't think jail is the answer but she shouldn't be allowed to reproduce again. Like seriously.

I agree with your last paragraph, however before judging her I'd want answers to some questions. Like why did she "have to" move in with her ex, was it her decision? Did she really genuinely have to or did she actually have other options but felt this was the best/only one? What was the reason for their breakup? What was her ex's opinion and actions around her pregnancy? Could this have been a domestic abuse situation? Why not wait a little longer and give the baby up for adoption?

I'm not saying you can or should answer any of this namechange, just that I can't personally judge her without knowing. She's responsible for her actions whatever the circumstances, but depending on what those circumstances were might change how I felt about her.

She tbh sounds completely irresponsible, multiple pregnancies, adoption, in care, 'body never recovered' is that another miscarried baby? Has she not heard of contraception? especially if juggling 3 men 🤷🏼‍♀️ She cannot be absolved of responsibility here, she knew what she was doing.

I agree it does sound as if she knew what she was doing with the abortion. She wanted the baby gone and tried to achieve that so should face the consequences.

I just wanted to say don't underestimate stupidity. Some people are thick as shit and I guess they can't help how they're born, but some people's logic can be totally flawed. I used to work with someone who had been told by her doctor that it'd be very bad for her to get pregnant at that point in her life because of her health. She also didn't want a baby at that moment in time and didn't have a steady boyfriend. She was by her own admission incapable of managing as-and-when or daily contraception and was scared of the implant because it caused her periods to stop while she was on it. She reckoned with her other health conditions she was taking enough pills to not get pregnant, despite none of them being contraceptive pills. I'm sure she'd have been very shocked if she did get pregnant. I don't know what you can say to someone with that thought process and beliefs.

I'm wondering why this woman in the news was in a relationship with 3 men, one of them her ex, and was it really truly her choice? Or was she perhaps not quite diagnosable with anything but vulnerable all the same and they were taking advantage of that? From the posts here she doesn't sound like a sensible intelligent person who has her shit together. I mean if she called an ambulance after the abortion she couldn't have had much of a plan around what she was doing and not getting caught etc. Prison isn't necessarily wrong though, she did need punishing to teach her to never do it again and it sounds like prison was the only deterrent for her. I just can't condemn her as evil like many people will, without knowing more about her and the circumstances. She could be spectacularly stupid rather than evil, although I know the end result has been the same. That poor baby, if only she'd waited a few more weeks the baby could have been adopted. So sad.

She deserves everything she gets,it's murder.At 32 weeks that child could have been born healthy.She even googled how she could lose her baby when she knew how far along she was all the time.Hope she rots.

Sigh.

I think what this woman did was horrific and she deserved the sentence.

BUT

She hadn't done it before. That judge was looking at another case, with a different woman, to try to get the level of sentence right. The details were of the other case.

So to summarise :

For some people here:

• if a 34 weeker is born, it becomes a person. Killing it is murder.
• if that same 34 weeker is as yet unborn, it can be aborted.

These views centre on the autonomy of the woman's body and I guess the idea that we do not get our independent personhood until a woman has given it to us - by birthing us.

For others who consider the baby s viability first, it seems crazy that if you may not kill born 34 weeker but you should be able to abort that same baby if it is as yet unborn.

It's very tricky.

Once again, it isn’t murder. Murder is defined in law. She was convicted of completely separate offences

@Babyboomtastic fuck my mistake omg ok that changes a lot for me then. Thanks!
Still disagree with jail
Still disagree totally with not owning up to the staff on call
IMO she needs to have psych support (from a hospital not a jail) to help get through this experience
I am for womens body women's choice. I just think she went about it all the wrong way

Categorically agree with everything said here.

Im so sick of people posting on social media about how unjust the sentance is, that she shouldn’t be in prison because it was ‘just an abortion’. I think she should have a much longer sentence and to be honest her children at home shouldn’t have to live with a mother who killed their sibling! She should not be allowed to care for children.

This wasn’t an abortion or a ‘late term abortion’ this was the cruel, painful killing of a full term baby.

I don't agree. Personally I hear both sides of the argument on the abortion debate, and I'm happy I don't need to be the one making the decision.

That said, I'm far more understanding of the pro abortion side for the very early stages, when it's much easier to see the fetus as a potential human than as an actual human.

Furthermore, I quite see the logic of women having the right to expel foreign entities from their body, even if it would mean the death of those enitites. That takes care of mid term abortion.

However, once you get to the stage of viability, the expelling argument falls down. For even if we agree she can expel the baby, she should be doing that in a way that doesn't wilfully and gratuitously damage it.

There just isn't a moral argument for allowing the killing of a 34 week old fetus. At that point it's more akin to a baby in an incubator than a part of the woman's body. Pretty sure nobody would condone the owner of an incubator killing the baby inside.

Honestly I think she got off lightly.

👏🏻 perfectly put.

I feel so very uncomfortable about this case and my reaction to it. I think I believe that aborting such a late term pregnancy is wrong but I also think I believe that the woman must have been desperate and chaotic to do such an unthinkable thing so maybe prison is not the right outcome for her (I am not sure I believe that prison is the right outcome for most desperate and chaotic people who commit crimes though so perhaps that influences my thinking).

I still do not know how I feel about it so this is quite a pointless post. It’s not really the done thing to feel conflicted when reply to a mumsnet thread is it?! We must all be a strident nest of vipers who say things like ‘no is a complete sentence’.

I feel desperately sad for the woman, for the baby (because I think some part of me does believe it’s a baby at that stage - whether or not it deserves personhood, I don’t know), the children of the woman. This will pray on my mind for a good while, I think.

Agree

I agree completely.

Whilst I strongly support women's rights to choose, and I disagree that 24 weeks is sufficient time for that small group of women who find themselves in an impossible situation at a 20-wk anomaly scan, I agree that the third trimester is just far too late to abort a healthy baby and some kind of consequence is justified.

Is prison the best place for that poor woman to come to terms with what she's done leaving the other children without their Mum for 14 mnths? Absolutely not.

Reading the judges comments it seems the covid lockdown was possibly an aggravating factor. Sad all round.

I had a prem baby ar 32 weeks. Needed no intervention at all. Completely viable, if I had killed him 3 hours before he was born would that have been OK?

It does. 24 weeks is the line. If you don’t want to call the foetus a baby after that, then call it a viable human life. It amounts to the same thing.

I was born at 27 weeks 41 years ago and am perfectly healthy. Shocking that someone could do that at 32 weeks. Being a mother doesn't mean you you don't deserve to be punished for your actions.
She had other choices and the ones she made led to this sorry state of affairs.

It's a horrible situation all around. The pregnancy was viable, and the lines have been drawn for good reason. She had other options including adoption, or making a decision a lot earlier. There has to be some consequence. Prison isn't it but her actions did lead to the death of a baby which would otherwise have survived. It's hopefully not a situation which will arise again, but desperately sad for the baby, and her other children who will now grow up with this.

If you chose to have a late term abortion at 32 weeks, then yes, that would have been OK imo.

I would trust that you made that choice in your best interests, and the situation you would be in to even consider doing something so difficult would need understanding, not punishment.