AIBU to think throwing a mum-of-four in prison for having an abortion is never the answer?

[therescoffeeinthatnebula]

Spotted this on Twitter and haven't seen it already being discussed.

Apparently, a woman is being sentenced today for having an abortion over the limit during lockdown. I don't know of the circumstances (can't find anything other than the Sunday Times article), only that she already had four children and claims she didn't know exactly how far along she was.

I think most of us would agree making medical appointments during lockdown was bloody difficult and that it's even harder to attend any appointment if you have children, given you're not normally allowed to take them with you.

Whatever the truth, I'm appalled to see a woman potentially thrown in prison for trying to seek an abortion during lockdown, especially when you look at how violence against women is treated. I'd have thought referring her for mandatory counselling would be more of an appropriate outcome than prison because finding out you aborted what could have been a viable baby has got to mess with anyone's head.

It's all very sad - she should have been able to access proper services earlier - but prison, to me, should never have been on the table as a consequence.

I didn't actually realise that abortion in this country was blanket illegal and that our rights to seek abortions up to the limit are actually exceptions to that law rather than a piece of legislation that stands on its own.

This is just hideous! How is this a good outcome? I wonder if the support workers know facts that we don't. Perhaps she is mentally ill? Perhaps she comes from a vulnerable segment of the population, or a community that doesn't have equal access.

But it's ok because god forbid her kids should not have a sibling that no one wanted!

Actually you don’t need to have sex to get pregnant. You just need semen

Sex can happen without consent which means rape. Not accidental no, but not consented by the woman.

Tell me you have no idea about the reality of some people's lives, without telling me you have no idea about the reality of some people's lives.

We don't know much about this woman's life but she'd left her partner then gone back during lockdown. She has a child with special needs. Maybe she'd thought she'd cope with a baby, then in lockdown with school, SN provision, childcare all shut overnight realised she couldn't and by then it was too late. Maybe she'd left her partner for good reason and then ended up back with him as she couldn't cope with the kids alone 24/7 when even parks were shut off. Maybe she'd dithered about termination before lockdown, or the father had promised her support then let her down. Maybe she's just very chaotic and struggling at the best of times, and that was far from the best of times.

I don't believe anyone aborts at 32 weeks because they think they can get away with breaking the law due to lockdown. It's far more likely that this was very much to do with lockdown, all of her options got much worse in that situation. I don't believe anyone would choose to go through late abortion like that, at home with a partner who doesn't know about the pregnancy and isn't the father, without being desperate. No one thinking clearly would do what she did in the way she did.

Murder and robbery and all sorts of crimes occur whether you allow it or not.

Is there any evidence she tried to access help earlier?

Her body was there first and she's the one providing life support to someone else, so she should be able to withdraw that life support at any time. No born human being has the right to use another human being's body as a life support machine, why should the unborn get more rights than the born? We don't even take organs from the dead without consent. That consent is presumed these days, but if you explicitly opt-out of post-mortem organ donation than that opt-out is respected. Your argument that the unborn baby's rights trump hers is giving the unborn baby more rights than any other human being whilst at the same time giving the woman fewer rights than a corpse. Giving women fewer rights than a corpse is a first class example of misogyny.

Why wouldn't they just continue to live with their father?

Care system and adoption! They have another parent!

Also the idea that the care system is worse than death for a baby would surely mean that social care should ensure women whose babies are going to be taken off them at birth have abortions to save the babies from the worse than death care system?
But then we'd have forced abortion? and I guess the argument would be: babies should endure something worse than death to prevent women having to have abortions.
Woman should have a right to give birth even if they can't care for the baby and the fate for the baby being born is worse than death?

Presumably for some people woman's bodily autoomy trumps everything, even things that are worse for babies than death (apparently)

Babies don't get much care in this logic do they?

Your insistence on comparing a legal and often necessary medical procedure to slavery is horrifically offensive.

You can be raped though.

You can use contraception accurately and it fails.

I wouldn't call this accidentally, but I would absolutely class these as unplanned.

Hope this doesn't offend anyone but what happened to the baby's body?

It doesn’t appear so from the article but who knows when her situation got so desperate that this was the only way out.

So how far would you take that sentiment? What if a woman is in labour? Should we allow termination then? How far down the birth canal can the baby be before we say it deserves some protection?

They had this debate in the US and the threshold seemed to be when most of the body is out and only the head remains inside. This was for partial birth abortions though, which I believe they are now banned.

I didn't say anything about consent. And as for your "you just need semen" comment, I said "sex", not "intercourse".
🙄

Now please explain to me how you can have sex accidentally.

Huh? I don’t care if you can see it to not, that doesn’t change the fact that location in regards to this issue isn’t merely a minor detail.

Being inside someone else’s body versus being a separate individual changes everything, it is not like the difference between Brighton and Hove.

She called the emergency services when she went into labour.

And once again with the sidestepping of the actual point.

If a law designed to prevent suffering and death actually results in significantly more of both, it’s a shit law.

It's shocking that there are people like you out there who thinks in this way - "why should the unborn get more rights than the born?" What a load of absolute crap. It's biology!

How that poor baby must have suffered.

I am very pro-choice but for me there's a line and she has way more than crossed it. If she was trying to conceal the pregnancy from the man she was living with at the time, she didn't make a great job of that did she?

I had an unplanned younger brother. My parents saw him as a blessing. I'm glad he's in my life.

Another thought just occurred if someone is teetering over a precipice and you are holding them to stop them falling over. Is it okay to just let go of your hand if you want to because "noone can use my body without my permission" - yes I know it's a fanciful example but the thought just occurred.

Good for you, doesn't give you the right to make women go through with unwanted pregnancies though.

From piecing things together from the various articles, paramedics were called to her home, but she then gave birth to a stillborn girl in the hospital.

I assume there was an autopsy from the information released (how else would they have established the actual age and no health conditions?) and then the body was either buried or cremated, as usual.

I had an unplanned younger brother. My parents saw him as a blessing. I'm glad he's in my life.

I have an unplanned younger sister. It doesn't change the fact that the aborted fetus from my mother's prior abortion is not my sibling and I do not miss it or wonder about what life would be like with them.

The google searches show that she was fully aware of the consequences of her actions though. If she could google those, then why not google services that could have helped her?

I am not understanding how it made anything 'better' that she went to the lengths of killing her baby rather than admitting she was pregnant in the first place? Would it not have been better to tell the truth, rather than have to admit she killed the child?

If your mum would have had an abortion you wouldn't have known he was a possibility, so it wouldn't have made a difference to your life as you wouldn't know any different.

The example is completely ridiculous. The reality is most people wouldn't stop and help in the first place, and secondly you wouldn't go to prison if you let go. It's nonsensical anyway because there is no equivalent to a pregnancy.

She will serve 14 months in custody, so presumably will be able to have care of the children after that unless there are other concerns. If she had accepted guilt at an earlier stage, she could have had a suspended sentence.

Good for you, doesn't mean you can force women to carry pregnancies they don't want.