Late term abortion, high court

[Anycrispsleft]

I saw this on the BBC this morning - it's High Court review of the rules on late term abortions. The campaigners are seeking to remove the exception to the ban on post 24 week abortion that allows it in the case of "non-lethal" disabilities. The woman who is asking for the review wants the law to be changed on the grounds that it's discrimination against disabled people.

Apologies if this case has been covered before, I'm a newcomer to FWR having been radicalised by you people on Twitter. I just wanted to express this thought that occurred to me: the trans debate has shown me that whatever good-thinking progressives think, rights are sometimes like pie, in that giving one person more rights can mean less rights for someone else. And this is also like that, isn't it? There's a balancing of the rights of the foetus (not that a foetus has legal rights, at least not yet) and the rights of the mother. Until now I used to sort of shy away from this bit of the ethics of abortion. I am very strongly pro choice, but I always wanted to be able to justify that stance in a sort of objective way, considering the cases of the foetus and the mother as though I had no skin in the game. And I realised I can't actually do that, because I do have skin in the game, because I am a woman, I have two girls, and I want all of us to have control over our own bodies. It's not that I think I am objectively right. I want to win this. I don't care about the rights and wrongs from an academic point of view. I don't want my children to have to carry a child they don't want to term. Full stop. I'm sure others would be able to put this in a much more eloquent way but I feel like I've reached a new point in my feminism and I wanted to share it. I'm not neutral. I'm team woman.

@FeistySheep passing judgement is exactly what you are doing.

And evoking murder to illustrate your point is an excellent way of communicating your lack of judgement

The only exceptions where I think abortion is acceptable is if the unborn baby has a lethal condition (anencephaly for example) or is conceived through rape or incest. In any other scenario, I absolutely believe every baby deserve a chance at life. A baby doesn’t have a say in the circumstances in which it is conceived, that is entirely down to the two adults who chose to have sexual intercourse. Yes, even if contraception is used, there will be very rare occasions where that fails. However even so, contraception never will give 100% protection and the adults deciding to have sex should and hopefully would understand this. Essentially, if you’re mature enough to have sex, then you’re also mature enough to deal with the possible consequences or at least you should be.

As for having an abortion due to the unborn child having a non lethal disability - children aren’t some sort of thing being mass produced in some sort of factory where those with “defects” (HATE that word) should be thrown away and discarded. My youngest child was born with Myelomeningocele (severe spina bifida), Hydrocephalus, Hip Dysplasia and Talipes and she is perfect just the way she is! It never once occurred to me to have an abortion, she would be/continues to be showered with love just like her siblings and she is amazing. I’ve kept a thread going since I was pregnant with her so feel free to check it out.

I obviously can’t make decisions for other people, but this is a subject I feel very strongly about and it is just my personal opinion.

@ObviousNameChage thank you 🙏🏻

@FeistySheep I am so sorry for your loss

And trust me, when you have disabled children, it bloody well does matter to you because THERE IS NO SUPPORT.

Absolutely. This is not a world full of heroes in a 'Children in Need' three minute video with Davina. The actual reality is very different and brutal.

[quote FeistySheep]@sinkgirl We don't agree on an ethical issue, which is fine. I've been polite and at no time have I passed judgement on anyone who thinks differently to me. You said I'm making it all about me - I only answered your question about me because you asked it!

People go through many horrendous things. It's acceptable for people who have not been in their shoes to state their opinions on a situation/issue. Otherwise we would not be able to say we think murder is wrong unless we've had a murdered family member, etc, which would be ridiculous. Debating ethical issues (without pinning judgement on specific people) is what talk forums are for.[/quote]
I said you’re making it all about you because you’re talking about how it wouldn’t make any difference to you if your child were disabled (which of course is extremely easy to say when you don’t have a disabled child/children).

I’m talking about making a decision that prevents your much wanted baby from suffering. Other women here have explained the very difficult painful decisions they have had to make, enduring that pain themselves so their baby does not have to endure it. And your “don’t have children if you can’t cope with a disabled child” is so far beyond ignorant of the realities, it’s actually painful.

Both of my twins are disabled. My life as a parent is nothing like yours, or my friends with non-disabled children. But that’s not what really hurts - what really hurts is that my childrens’ lives will be nothing like your childrens’ lives, and the things you will take a for granted are things I can’t even hope to imagine.

Of course you could express a view on murder but I would certainly hope that you would listen more to the loved ones of murder victims when they point out that you come from a privileged position of not having experienced that thing

Goinggently - nothing meant by 'evoking' murder... Substitute it with whatever you like. Any ethical issue. People who haven't needed benefits should be allowed to politely debate whether Universal Credit should be abolished or not. It wasn't meant to be a point about this issue specifically - I just believe everyone should be allowed to talk about all ethical issues. I wouldn't like a society where this wasn't allowed.

@Sinkgirl - okay, we are perhaps talking about different things. Conditions where the child will experience lifelong suffering are a different kettle of fish. I thought we were discussing Downs syndrome, as per the article in the OP? I didn't read it, but saw the BBC news report on it earlier. I assume it's the same thing?

For those who are pro choice what about sex selection as a reason?

@FeistySheep When people talk about 'ethical issues' in a lofty and detached way it sounds incredibly trite.

Unless you're willing to get down in the dirt and very real, complex dilemmas that play out in peoples lives then your opinions lack relevance.

It would be like me proselytising on the struggles black women face in their daily lives, about which i have no clue. If you have no lived experience on which to draw, you're better off listening.

@jlgsy94

The only exceptions where I think abortion is acceptable is if the unborn baby has a lethal condition (anencephaly for example) or is conceived through rape or incest. In any other scenario, I absolutely believe every baby deserve a chance at life. A baby doesn’t have a say in the circumstances in which it is conceived, that is entirely down to the two adults who chose to have sexual intercourse. Yes, even if contraception is used, there will be very rare occasions where that fails. However even so, contraception never will give 100% protection and the adults deciding to have sex should and hopefully would understand this. Essentially, if you’re mature enough to have sex, then you’re also mature enough to deal with the possible consequences or at least you should be.

As for having an abortion due to the unborn child having a non lethal disability - children aren’t some sort of thing being mass produced in some sort of factory where those with “defects” (HATE that word) should be thrown away and discarded. My youngest child was born with Myelomeningocele (severe spina bifida), Hydrocephalus, Hip Dysplasia and Talipes and she is perfect just the way she is! It never once occurred to me to have an abortion, she would be/continues to be showered with love just like her siblings and she is amazing. I’ve kept a thread going since I was pregnant with her so feel free to check it out.

I obviously can’t make decisions for other people, but this is a subject I feel very strongly about and it is just my personal opinion.

I completely agree with you, we were advised to abort our daughter and didn't. I also know someone who had normal scans and a normal pregnancy but when her daughter was born it became clear she was profoundly brain damaged and disabled. There is never a guarantee a baby won't have a disability. What next? Kill them after birth if they develop a disability?

I am pro life. Part of my job is resuscitating preterm babies. I find it physically nauseating that I can be trying to save a preterm baby in one room in a hospital, and in another room in a hospital a pregnancy of the same gestation can be deliberately ended. None of that gives me the right to force a woman to carry to term a baby with significant abnormalities, or to judge the parents whether they choose to end the pregnancy, or to continue it.

There is a lot of focus as well on babies. People saying that a baby with downs is just as valuable as a baby without; pics of cute babies and giggling toddlers , and that awful patronising " people with downs are so full of love" line that gets trotted out. (This enrages me...SOME might be, some might be grumpy buggers . It is all down to individual personality just as it is with every other human being)

But noone ever wants to talk about the man in his 30s who still lives with his mum, can't be left alone ever for safety's sake and doesn't have adequate provision in the community. Or about his mum who has had to give up her job because of the lack of provision . Who never gets a break ever.

Whether to take on that life should be a woman's choice.

@Rainy365

From the tweets they are also using human rights as their argument - that viable foetuses are protected after 24 weeks and so should non-lethal babies. They have quoted infant life preservation act 1929 and article 2 of ECHR (which does not state when life begins).

It’s hard to get the exact points just from Twitter and I wish I could find an account that was more neutral reporting from court.

Yes.

From the guardian article it sounds like they are going for indirect discrimination i.e. this adversely affects disabled people who are already born.

But Heidi's tweets suggest they are also arguing for personhood and human rights for foetuses.

I think they are vanishingly unlikely to win on those grounds. UK law is well established - legal personhood begins at birth. This essay provides a good summary:

English law is clear that, before birth, there is no person on whom legal rights or duties can be bestowed. In Paton, Sir George Baker held that ‘a fetus… cannot have a right of its own until it is born and has a separate existence from its mother’. Lord Mustill echoed this conclusion almost 20 years later: ‘it is established beyond doubt for the criminal law, as for the civil law… that the child en ventre sa mere does not have distinct human personality…’. Birth as the focal point of personality is a product of the criminal law and negligence in civil law, and is a tradition of the time in which the law was formulated. Savell argues that the law’s insistence that subjects with personality have been born is understandable in the civil context, ‘as…conferring legal status on fetuses might bring pregnant women’s rights into direct conflict with those of fetuses’. A lack of fetal personhood also precludes criminal charges being levied against pregnant women for harm caused in utero. Recognising fetal personhood, in civil or criminal law, would be a significant curtailment of pregnant women’s liberty and would create incentives for vulnerable women to evade medical and social care, putting themselves (and their fetus) at risk.

academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054#199919016

However if they lose at the High Court they could take their case to the ECHR which has so far swerved giving a definitive answer when asked to consider whether a foetus has human rights.

80. It follows from this recapitulation of the case-law that in the circumstances examined to date by the Convention institutions – that is, in the various laws on abortion – the unborn child is not regarded as a “person” directly protected by Article 2 of the Convention and that if the unborn do have a “right” to “life”, it is implicitly limited by the mother’s rights and interests. The Convention institutions have not, however, ruled out the possibility that in certain circumstances safeguards may be extended to the unborn child.

www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/2004/326.html

If they win in ECHR on those grounds, then we are fucked.

I had a late TFMR
Like many others on this thread, I got bad news at my 20 week scan.
Thankfully, and by chance, I was in a hospital that had a Fetal medicine unit so was able to be seen by them pretty quickly and had an amnio within a week
The scan showed ‘soft markers’ for Edwards or Patau so we were fairly certain that meant a baby that wouldn’t make it.

But it then took 2 weeks for the full results to come back, and they came back clear for Edwards and Patau.
So we were then referred back to Fetal medicine who then had a waiting list because of the consultants had gone on study leave

We were unbelievably fortunate to have the means to go private and went to see Prof Nicolades at the Fetal Medicine Centre who was able to give us a pretty definitive opinion that it was 1 of 2 potential conditions, both of which were incompatible with life

This meant I got to have the termination within a whisker inside 24 weeks and was able to avoid many difficulties of going over that limit.

But, if we hadn’t had £500 to get this opinion, I would have had to wait another few weeks for the medical opinion/diagnosis, I would have been well past 24 weeks

So tightening the law and time limit creates a terrible two tier system where those with means to rush through the diagnosis in the private system get to terminate.
And what does that mean..? Women who are already financially struggling and now facing further hardship bringing up a disabled child.

By awful chance, 6 months after my termination, my sister in law had a baby with a serious genetic condition.
Seeing the hell her life has become dealing with it has meant I’ve never doubted my decision for a second.
Seeing that poor baby have operation after operation after operation, while the siblings are sidelined - it’s nothing I would ever put my family through and I will fight to the end to defend the right of women who want to terminate to avoid the same fate

@Antiqueanniesmagiclanternshow

There is a lot of focus as well on babies. People saying that a baby with downs is just as valuable as a baby without; pics of cute babies and giggling toddlers , and that awful patronising " people with downs are so full of love" line that gets trotted out. (This enrages me...SOME might be, some might be grumpy buggers . It is all down to individual personality just as it is with every other human being)

But noone ever wants to talk about the man in his 30s who still lives with his mum, can't be left alone ever for safety's sake and doesn't have adequate provision in the community. Or about his mum who has had to give up her job because of the lack of provision . Who never gets a break ever.

Whether to take on that life should be a woman's choice.

True. Actually if the 30 yo is talked about at all is normally in terms of weird, suspicious, predatory, making people uncomfortable, no smoke without fire and so on...

@LangClegsInSpace thanks for the info. It’s frightening what could happen to women.

The article below was linked by another poster earlier in the thread but I found this quote particularly striking.

” If the foetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the foetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body.”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/04/marshae-jones-alabama-fetal-rights-alarmed

Surely it would also have implications for medical consent in children? Currently the parents make those choices, but if a foetus trumps the wishes of the parents, what of children?

@GoingGently

I think the stigma only comes from people who have no understanding of the complexities of this situation, not from people who have chosen to terminate.

No mother who had terminated for Downs would ever judge you for keeping your baby. They might find it painful to spend time around your child, but only because it compounds their own trauma, guilt and loss. They would never 'stigmatise' your Downs child. I find the concept of their choice for their children stigmatising yours to be an odd one. There's not a parent who has been faced with this choice who has not contemplated either outcome. It's just incredibly complicated and painful.

In my view these debates only serve to add extra pain to those who are already suffering - on both sides. It's frankly irrelevant to anyone not facing a poor diagnosis. My fear is that politicising Down's syndrome and attempting to paint a rosy picture whilst denying the very real other side of the coin is incredibly difficult for women who've suffered a TFMR, and adds stigma on stigma. It probably makes life more difficult for parents of downs kids who are not ok too.

I am a TFMR mum myself, though my daughter's diagnosis was for a syndrome that my doctors had never heard of it's so rare. It's only usually diagnosed after birth so the only resources online are for families of living children. Like Down's it's a spectrum from 'not that bad' to catastrophic multisystem failure, profound learning difficulties, violence and cancer. I feel 'lucky' to have received a prenatal diagnosis but also lucky that I am able to live my life without seeing campaigns in the press and efforts to criminalise what was very much an act of mercy and love for my daughter. Whilst I have to remind myself that I made the right decision for me, it's practically destroyed me and I'll carry the burden of that loss for the rest of my life. I have no living children and don't know whether I'll ever succeed but made that choice to protect my daughter anyway. Part of that choice was wondering who on earth would care for her when I'm gone or no longer able.

Nobody should be stigmatised for a choice they have made, especially when everybody makes that choice out of love. The outcome of that will look different for different people. We have to allow for people to do whatever is right for them and their families in these devastating situations.

When I spoke of stigma in my previous post, I wasn't referring to feeling stigma from people who have chosen to terminate their pregnancies due to downs, I meant sometimes it feels as though society as a whole stigmatises Down's. Sorry if I wasn't clear about that. I don't for one moment judge anyone who has TFMR for Down's (or for anything else for that matter) it is truly a horrendous situation when you receive a prenatal diagnosis.

I don't know what the answer is, but it is an incredibly upsetting debate on both sides. I'm sorry if my post upset anyone who has had a TFMR

1940s yes it was diagnosed prenatally, no other obvious health issues

@Wanttocry

I am a TFMR mum myself, though my daughter's diagnosis was for a syndrome that my doctors had never heard of it's so rare. It's only usually diagnosed after birth so the only resources online are for families of living children. Like Down's it's a spectrum from 'not that bad' to catastrophic multisystem failure, profound learning difficulties, violence and cancer. I feel 'lucky' to have received a prenatal diagnosis but also lucky that I am able to live my life without seeing campaigns in the press and efforts to criminalise what was very much an act of mercy and love for my daughter. Whilst I have to remind myself that I made the right decision for me, it's practically destroyed me and I'll carry the burden of that loss for the rest of my life. I have no living children and don't know whether I'll ever succeed but made that choice to protect my daughter anyway. Part of that choice was wondering who on earth would care for her when I'm gone or no longer able. I think this is such an important point because so many people seem to think that late abortions are done selfishly because the mother hasn’t got the child they wanted.

I was in a very similar situation - found out after a series of bungled scans that our baby had a similar syndrome at 24 weeks. We kept the baby. The decision was heartbreaking. It was very much a sliding doors moment - we had absolutely no way to know how he would turn out. If I’m brutally honest a large part of my decision was driven by fear. I wasn’t brave enough to go through with a tfmr and am full of awe at those who have.

I’m not really sure why I’m commenting to be honest, I guess just to say you don’t know what you’re talking about unless you’ve gone through it. The one thing that would make it so much worse for anyone going through that is to take away the right to choose.

[quote FeistySheep]@sinkgirl I'm saying I think that there should be laws put in place to ensure the financial and practical support is available, NOT that I think people should have to rely on help from family or charities etc. This should be in place before any law is changed.

Since you asked, my first child was born without disabilities, and I am pregnant again. I haven't had any screening tests, nor did I for dc1, because it won't make any difference. I got pregnant accepting that my children may be disabled, and I will care for them to the best of my ability if they are. [/quote]
I would have said it wouldn’t have made a difference until it happened to me and my baby. Again, no one truly knows what they would do until they are in those shoes.

I never had any doubts that if I had a foetus with downs i would terminate. You can't tell the extent of it in utero. You can perhaps force women to give birth when they don't want to by shortening the time scales but you can't force them to keep the baby. More early testing is needed for downs for earlier termination but that Sally whatshername was campaigning against that because it would reduce the amount of downs pregnancies. So in other words what's next - don't allow early testing and don't allow late abortion. Force women to have babies with downs and all the pressure that puts on everyone in their family? It's a woman's choice what to do completely

I am really struggling to understand how controlling other people's choices makes life any better for people with Down's Syndrome.

'My family' is not 'your family'. Just because I might not want something for my child doesn't mean I think yours shouldn't be here... that is the beauty of choice. We all get to make them.

I don't get this desire to control other people at all...