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.

This is another thing that Heidi doesn't understand, DS is tested for at 10 - 14 weeks, if the mother chooses to abort for DS it is not likely to be at 24 weeks.

It is also legal for a woman to abort up to date if her own life is in danger. And that applies to to a foetus that is not disabled.

I wonder then, theoretically, whether an acceptable law would be something like? :

-Abortion available on demand for any reason up to 24 weeks
-Abortion available after 24 weeks where the mother's life is at risk or where the foetus has a condition incompatible with life

DS is not incompatible with life. What is the moral difference between killing a viable foetus with DS inside the uterus, or outside the uterus, at the same gestation?

There are a lot of comorbidities of downs syndrome that can be incompatible with life or drastically impact the duration and quality of life.

As said above, post 24 weeks termination is far more like to be because the foetus has one of those comorbidities.

Morally, I have a bigger problem with insisting a child is born that is going to live a short painful life. That seems totally unethical. If that child was an animal, you'd be prosecuted for "unnecessary suffering".

I suppose then if you were using the wording I had suggested you would have to get into a definition of "incompatible with life" and how long a prognosis would count - hours, days, a year? It's so difficult.

Obviously I think it's best if the law is left as it is for now.

I don't think it's unethical for a woman to choose not to have abortion for any reason, though, I wouldn't go that far. The intention behind continuing or not continuing is almost always going to be what she believes is in the best interests of her child. My friend chose to continue with a pregnancy where she knew the child would have a lot of problems and wouldn't live to adulthood. I don't think her decision was cruel or unethical, and neither would it have been cruel or unethical to terminate.

No, that would not be acceptable. That would be a restriction similar in practice to what the claimants in this case sought. I'm glad they lost.

Current law is acceptable but it would be better (more robust to challenge) if abortion was decriminalised altogether and we moved to something like the New Zealand model:

Abortion on demand up to 20 weeks
Abortion after 20 weeks where 'clinically appropriate in the circumstances'

www.health.govt.nz/our-work/regulation-health-and-disability-system/abortion-services-information-health-practitioners/abortion-legislation

She does understand this because she's also been involved in campaigning against early screening for years.

2016:

So I've just listened to the first 8 mins of Heidi's mother being interviewed. If Heidi is so knowledgeable why isn't she being interviewed? She's giggling about living alone, and working but I can't see any understanding of the issues.

Yes, perhaps 'understand' is pushing it a bit.

You did better than me, I made it to 5 minutes and stopped listening after Liz said they're 'trying to get rid of people with DS'.

It's incredibly abusive when you think about it. She's sat there next to her daughter saying people want to get rid of people like her.

Can't help being reminded of how 'trans kids' keep being told that people want them dead.

Yes, and it isn't actually true. I remember when EastEnders had a character give birth to a baby with DS the parents of the baby 'actor' knew they were expecting a baby with DS.

Abortion on demand up to 20 weeks
Abortion after 20 weeks where 'clinically appropriate in the circumstances'

Exploring my feelings about this. This wording is so vague as to leave it as a personal moral decision to abort even healthy babies, at any gestation (providing one could find doctors willing to do it).

It's not consistent to say that it's ethical/legal to kill a 28 week baby inside the womb but unethical/illegal to kill it outside the womb.

Theoretically you could get around this by saying that a woman could request the baby to be removed from her body, but not stipulate that it be killed beforehand, as in the case of the woman mentioned above. I'm not saying that I would want this as a law, just trying to find a consistent position.

I actually find myself resistant to thinking through these arguments as they all seem to lead to intolerable outcomes.

@chella2 I take the 'clinically appropriate' wording to mean that the decision is between the woman and her medical team, so it's not just about aborting a healthy baby after 20 weeks for the fun of it.

There is zero evidence to show that women abort healthy babies late on just because they have decided they no longer want that baby. All the evidence on late term abortions is that they are for medical reasons or where the mother's life is at risk, i.e. a cancer diagnosis and chemo.

I trust women. I trust them to make sound decisions about their lives, their wellbeing and their existing families. Don't you?

It's not about trusting women or thinking they have abortions for fun. I'm genuinely trying to find a position that upholds women's rights to bodily autonomy but is philosophically consistent with respect to the rights of the child.

I don't find the argument that no one would do it, therefore it can remain legal, convincing. If no one ever did anything unethical then we wouldn't need to have laws and courts and jails at all. Of course not everything that is unethical is illegal, but the point that troubles me is the inconsistency around the legality of killing this theoretical 28 week baby inside/outside the mother's body.

@chella2 the law in the UK is very simple: a human being has no rights until they have been born. Any change to that and you are into debates around personhood, and you have but to look at what happens in countries where those laws exist: women get jailed for having miscarriages and stillbirths. The moment you go down that path, you are taking away bodily autonomy from the woman. And let me be clear about this: any removal of any bodily autonomy it a step too far.

At 28 weeks you aren't killing a baby, you're carrying out a late term abortion. That's harsh, it's horrible for the woman involved (who will be doing it because all the alternatives are worse) but it's the way it has to be, because the consequences of doing it any other way are unthinkable.

I know what you're saying, I really do, and this is why I always come back to thinking the current laws are a fudge, but they're a fudge that in practice generally results in the least awful consequences, and therefore leave them be.

You could also argue that the NZ law is a fudge - but its huge advantage is that it takes abortion out of the domain of criminal law and places it firmly in the domain of the purely medical. I would like to see this enacted in the UK.

@chella2 If you know anyone whose baby died soon after birth from a condition they were told later than 20 weeks was incompatible with life later or anyone who has to take care babies like that, then you will understand why the law is a fudge and hasn't been touched.

Yes, it is another kind of fudge, relying on "no woman would do that" for the unethical cases, or if they would, no doctor would agree to it. In practice, I imagine it results in similar outcomes to the UK laws.

Redwing, I don't have any difficulty reconciling cases where the foetus has a condition that is incompatible with life. Which is of course desperately sad and my heart goes out to anyone in that situation.

The complexity I see and where I wrestle with it is around cases where the foetus is viable/healthy and could survive on its own.

@chella2 define 'viable' and 'healthy'. The data is very clear: the vast majority of DS pregnancies are terminated well before the 20 week mark. The vast majority of all pregnancies are terminated well before the 20 week mark. Those pregnancies which are terminated after 24 weeks are TFMR. So really, your 'healthy viable' babies who are being terminated are purely hypothetical, because that isn't happening.

What you're left with is the idea that a DS baby is healthy. That can be a yes or a no - as mentioned upthread, the mother of the other child behind the Heidi Crowter case was going on about her son being 'healthy' and then in another post listing all the health issues he has and the hospital visits in the pipeline.

Ultimately each woman has to choose whether or not she wants to live like that - and I'm not even going into the massively increased risk of very early onset dementia that comes with DS.

I don't see any options that are better than the fudge and which don't involve taking a woman's choice away.

It's a medical decision, bound by medical ethics, i.e. acting in the best interests of the patient (for the avoidance of doubt, the patient is the pregnant woman).

I understand your difficulties surrounding a "grey diagnosis". My DS (and DD, they had the same issue, but for ease of writing, I'm just going to reference DS. ) could have survived, he wasn't incompatible with life. But he would have suffered, and had a short, hard, painful life filled with operations, medical intervention and hospital treatment. Him dying was inevitable, probably at birth or in the first week. More than likely in the first year. Five years would have been possible. He may have even made it to teenage years.

The condition he had, and it's level of severity, is a sliding scale, he had a very, very severe version of it, with complications. His condition affected both the body and the brain. I wasn't willing to play Russian roulette with his quality of life.

Not being incompatible with life doesn't mean that they are compatible with living. I would have preferred not to have to make the choices I did, but it was the lesser of two evils. He deserved better, they both did.

They're seeking permission to appeal to the Supreme Court

twitter.com/HeidiCrowter95/status/1612388667041120260

I really hope they don't get it, and that if they do, they will once again lose.

Update: Supreme Court has refused their appeal so they're now seeking to be heard in the ECtHR:

https://twitter.com/HeidiCrowter95/status/1659860830438019073