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.

No one should be forced to provide life for another person. If YOU seriously believe that they should then you belong on the Handmaid's Tale. Or God forbid someone ever need one of your organs to stay alive, I guess you think the state should just make you hand it over to them. That's messed up.

Biology isn't misogynist. How we handle that biology is.

You accuse me of "A Level philosophy-itis". Only one of us is engaging in moral relativism and throwing late-pregnant women under the bus to do so, and it's not me.

You're trying to reason and logic your way through a fundamentally illogical and unreasonable situation

OMG, how dare I use logic! I should just use feelings to decide what should be legal and what shouldn't! Because that would never result in biased and inconsistent outcomes and unfair laws that hurt some women more than others!

FFS. Being told that I shouldn't use logic and reason to debate a matter of ethics and whether or not a law should be changed has to be Peak Mumsnet. The whole of law is based on logic and precedent and judges trying to make rulings that are logical and consistent with other rulings.

I'm sorry but I refuse to believe that a late-term, self-induced abortion is an action any mentally well woman would take were it not borne from sheer panic and lack of other viable options. This is a desperate woman who needs help, not a hardened criminal.

It doesn't matter what you refuse to believe. The woman had a psychological assessment conducted by qualified professionals and was found to be suffering from no mental illness. There is no reason she couldn't have accessed an earlier term abortion safely given the fact she knew about the pregnancy before lockdown.

Also, as I said above safe abortions absolutely were available. I had one. I would have travelled to have one too if that was necessary.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that she continued with the pregnancy in the hope that the father would change his mind, the one she left her original partner for. It happens. A minority of women, blinded by false hope, do believe that a baby will save their relationship or bring somebody back to them.

Perhaps she held out that hope until the 11th hour when she finally accepted he wasn't coming back and resigned herself to the abortion as she didn't want to be left by her older children's father too and be left with neither.

I have more sympathy for the poor innocent man who took her back under false pretenses only to be met with a stillborn baby arriving in his front room which he knew nothing about. That man battled to save the baby that was treat as collateral. I hope he's getting the help he needs.

This.
there is a awful lot of double standards on this thread…..so a wanted pregnancy is a baby, but an unwanted one a fetus, which is it ? it can’t be both ?

Also, a get out jail free card cos you have 4 kids to look after ? well we could all break any laws we wanted in that case. Sorry, but aborting a viable pregnancy at such a late stage is revolting.

There are female prolifers you know

@rowanoak

She had options available to her in this country. She chose early on not to use them and opted to abort at 32-34 weeks when the foetus had a 95% survival rate and could feel pain. That is what has annoyed me. It is nothing to do with being anti-abortion.

@eggsbenedict23 yes i think most of us are aware that you dont have to be male to be a misogynist

And a stillborn baby is registered as being a stillbirth, a certificate is issued to state that.

Well to be fair to @VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia you have your single ethical principle and you are prepared to see it logically through to a dystopian end, dismissing all competing moral questions with an extraordinary certainty in the primacy of this one position.

Often when people are arguing one entrenched position you can test it with some hypothetical question about how far they'd go with that and you try to imagine the worst thing ever like...I don't know, torturing babies to death...

But here, with you and your bodily autonomy absolutism you are still 'yep, even if it means horrible deaths for healthy babies.' when that is actually the reality. Even then, only bodily autonomy matters.

It does appear to me like a type of madness, when such inhumane acts can be justified with such logic, and when the undoubtedly painful deliberate killing of a healthy baby is dismissed as 'icky'

When most people think about what a 32 week fetus is like and then imagine it being deliberately slowly killed they feel revulsion and horror at something which we know is morally wrong at a deep level.
Describing that feeling as icky reveals mengele levels of justification for horror.

I really do think some women's rights advocates have lost their minds on this. Comparing pregnant women to corpses and babies to rapists. Sure, wank off with your sophistry on Mumsnet all night long, but 5 minutes of exposing this crap to the general public and you'd be done.

Yes, we see you.

@rowanoak

Nobody forced her to provide life to someone else. She had months to have am abortion legally and actively chose not to do it. As someone else has said, there are very reasonable abortion services in the UK that she could have used.

You cannot be serious with that last paragraph. Your misogyny is showing even more than in your first disgusting post. How on earth do you presume to know anything about the 'poor, innocent man' ffs.

@StrawberryWasp Well said, there's a kind of madness to these extreme positions.

@FrillyGoatFluff I've just seen your comment and wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss. You shouldn't have to see the utter tripe being spouted on here about "foetus not baby" and the rest of the dehumanising, nasty rhetoric being put out there and it infuriates me that you've had to. I hope you received all of the support you needed and are coping as best you can. May your darling little girl rest in peace 💐

This is really what it comes down to.

We can waffle all day about what should or shouldn't be deemed right for all women everywhere based on how we feel. But at the end of it all, the foetus is dependent on its host and whatever that host (the pregnant woman) chooses to do during that pregnancy is entirely up to her.

If she decides its a baby, it is. If she feels that this is just a tiny parasite then that's what it is. If she's somewhere inbetween and makes choices that would horrify me and make me hate her forever I'll still fight to the death for her right to make them.

The poor innocent man who she was too petrified to tell she was pregnant despite the child being conceived while they were apart.

I hope hes not the kind of man who made sure he got his but expected her to behave likea nun

Nothing wrong with being anti abortion. I am. I think abortion harms women, wider society and of course the child who is aborted.

Just wanted to clarify that (hopefully obviously) I meant that no one should be forced to use their body to provide life for someone else or to grow another human being etc. Anyone pregnant should be allowed to decide they no longer want to be and should not be forced into continuing to carry the pregnancy.

I hadn't seen the part of the comment about actual infanticide - i.e., killing a person once they are alive - and I think that's a false analogy purposefully designed to conflate different issues. I was talking about a fetus being kept alive by the mother's body... in which case, then, no, the woman should never be forced to keep it alive, as it is her body and she should have the right to decide what she wants in it or not, not to mention that she should have the right to decide whether she wants to have the huge responsibility of bringing a child into this world.

Not only that but I've found that the people claiming that a woman should be made to carry a pregnancy to term and have the child, and especially the ones who go off about how other people would "love" to adopt it blah blah blah are usually the ones who purposefully bring children into this world just to abuse it to make themselves feel better, and who do or would love to do the same thing with children they adopt and brag about "saving" while abusing said child behind closed doors.

Ask me how I know. (Daughter of fundie Evangelical Christian parents who abused us three bio kids and adopted two more kids to abuse once I managed to escape/left for college, while forcing us all to portray the picture perfect image to their church and the world at large and especially on Facebook etc. It's no surprise my parents are of the "religious" belief that abortion is wrong and that women should be forced to carry a baby to term and that if they don't want it they should give it to people like them to "love" aka abuse. It happens to conveniently line up with their personal goals of loving to abuse children/anyone they can force to live with them or who are otherwise in their orbit. No thanks! I'll pass.)

Obviously I don't talk to my parents anymore at all as an adult and have been through intensive therapy to deal with the trauma they inflicted on me and my siblings (and I'm not nearly as messed up by them as my poor adopted siblings are because they also have adoption trauma to deal with; therefore I personally hate when people push the narrative that adoption is such a good thing for children when it very often is a horrible thing for them--not just for my siblings for for many adopted children, even when the adoption is otherwise a pretty good one... they still have trauma due to not being with their biological parent).

For all these reasons and more (such as the fact that I'm a woman and a I have a uterus and I don't like the state telling me what to do with my own body, ha... anyone who would is an authoritarian-loving bootlicker, IMO), obviously I'm 100% pro choice and I believe children should only be brought into this world if they are completely wanted and loved by at least one biological parent who can love them the way that they deserve. Otherwise IMO abortion is the best option for the fetus and the mother and society at large.

And I give major side eye to people claiming women should be forced to bear children for other people/themselves to raise, as to me that is the height of selfishness, sexism and also just plain either naivety or planned cruelty. So I avoid people who say that kind of thing like the plague as IMO they are the worst kinds of people.

I commented very early on in this thread asking for a link and stating that I thought there must be more to this than in the OP. To now learn they were 32-34 weeks on is simply heartbreaking.

To remove a mother from her children a judge must be sure it is the right thing not just for the individual crime but also for society.

This is not a case of someone who was confused about dates. She knew what she was doing and she had plenty of time to make alternative arrangements. Once a pregnancy is past 24 weeks, you have lost your right to choose. I'm grateful it's not just 6 weeks, like in other countries. She had every opportunity to do something different but didn't. I believe the outcome is correct.

@Dacadactyl how does abortion harm women?

Yes, it's clearly the man's fault.

The law isn't just based on logic it's based on some fundamental principles of morality that we collectively agree and which have been informed by Judeo Christian teaching.

Different cultures base their laws on different principles.

Slavery is actually a good example. There's no logical reason it's wrong, it made huge sense for thousands of years which is why people did it.
We decided however that if we believe in that every individual has equal worth (which was a radical development in beliefs) it cannot be justified.
This is a moral not a logical belief.

Killing healthy viable babies is something you either believe is wrong or not.

@slashlover i know right. Not nice to be blamed by default is it? But women get it all the time.

Nothing wrong with being anti abortion. I am. I think abortion harms women, wider society and of course the child who is aborted

Not being able to access abortion also harms women, children, families and societies. Plenty of countries have made abortion illegal and guess what?? It doesn't stop
women from having abortions. It just stop women from being able to access safe abortion and plenty of women are harmed and even die by having unsafe abortions

@AfricanGrey I believe abortion harms a woman's mental health. There are plenty of women who say they regret having an abortion.

Granted there are some who say it was a "relief" or whatever, but I honestly think there bound to be mental health repercussions for committing this act. How could there not be?