UK woman convicted of abortion

[Veterinari]

Full story here www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/woman-given-suspended-sentence-for-having-abortion-in-the-uk-a6968676.html

Very sad. Is there a will in NI to update legislation on this issue? As it stands everyone loses

Why are pregnancies conceived through rape less important than any other pregnancy?
Why are those foetuses less deserving of life?

No one argues that an ectopic pregnancy should continue, when it would cause serious harm to the mother. Even the most crackpot forced birth views allow for termination in this case, even if they use weasel words to call it a primary treatment for the woman with a secondary effect of terminating a pregnancy.

So on a basic level, it is clear that it is acceptable to terminate a pregnancy that will cause serious and potentially fatal harm to a women if it continues.

Unless you are going to attempt to minimise the impact of rape, or worse, say that mental health issues aren't comparable to physical health issues, it is pretty fucking clear why it is acceptable to terminate a pregnancy that results from rape if continuing it will cause harm to the woman and why a woman should have full autonomy over a decision that so hugely impacts on her own mental health.

I would pose the question only - what SHOULD happen to women with unwanted pregnancies? In RoI, in NI?
What should they do?

Anyone? Anywhere, on either side? Or the middle is grand too.

sparechange so if a woman has a proven mental illness it's ok?

So, again, a woman has to somehow prove that she's worthy of deciding what she should do with her own body? What she should do with something that will impact the rest of her life?

Instead of just allowing her to make that decision herself for whatever reason?

Sorry Walter, I am definitely not suggesting there should be any sort of justification at all. I believe all women should have full autonomy over their bodies and their decisions at all times.
I got a bit ahead of myself with ovaries post and thought she was asking for a justification on abortion for rape victims.
Someone else has asked the same on another thread on the same subject, parroting the bile from that harridan Smyth who genuinely doesn't believe in exemptions for rape victims.
The red mist descended and I replied before reading the other posts

Understood spare. Thanks for clarifying. I think there's quite a bit of red mist floating around :)

Someone asked about rape.

I don't think a general moral principle is null if it doesn't work for every outlying case. Life is too complex. We will never, ever get away from agonising moral dilemma where the rights of innocent parties appear to be set against each other. Deciding who is more innocent and more deserving should be difficult and this issues should be debated. I have no problem looking at cases where my position is strained and the way ahead isn't clear-cut. I'm not afraid of any house of cards tumbling down. It's not as if my position is particularly defensible - I think abortion is wrong but it's the lesser of two evils to legalise it.

I am afraid, though, of the kind of thinking that has got us to where we are today, where venom is unleashed at the idea that someone would have a problem with a foetus being killed and placed in a dustbin, and the idea that another woman (who had recently suffered a miscarriage) was somehow morally obliged to ignore the almost certain knowledge of what she would be doing if she put the bins out that morning. There is something lacking in a society that sees only one victim there. And that is what those flatmates wanted to say, I believe, when they talked to the press. They were trying to say their experience was also awful, and they were in an impossible position. I don't think anyone has the right to say they were not in an impossible decision. They were, because they felt it to be the case.

i have had 2 tfmr due to a genetic condition 1 early and1 after 24 weeks i dont care what the pro lifers think of my choice because they were not the ones that would have had to watch my children suffer everyday like i watched a family member suffer.
veryproudvolleyballmum i feel so sorry that you didnt even get a choice to decide what to do .
i thought that this was about a woman who had taken pills to end an unwanted early pregnancy and because of where she lives was prosecuted instead.
not a pick a fight on those of us who have had to make heartbreaking decisions that we wished we ever had to

Can we have a figure on the number of late term abortions there are in the UK each year.

Then can we talk about the reasons for those abortions including the number which have Down Syndrome (including the severity).

Just so we can remove the emotive distorting clap trap from the thread please and give a bit of background context.

Pregnancy doesn't kill you (except in exceptional circumstances). Abortion does kill.

Actually both do. Deaths caused by pregnancy do not have to be physically related to the baby.

Do you know that 23% of all maternal deaths in the UK has mental health related causes with 1 in 7 dying from suicide. (source - National Maternity Review 2016).

Just to clarify the important point here. Deaths by suicide in the 12 months after giving birth are classed as maternal deaths.

This is because we have both physical and mental health which are both important. Either one being poorly looked after can be fatal. This is 2016, and thankfully we are now beginning to acknowledge that both are crucial to our all round well being and neither should be ignored or neglected.

So are we really in 2016, proposing we extend restricting access to existing choice and saying this wouldn't have another effect?

Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what might happen?

I would pose the question only - what SHOULD happen to women with unwanted pregnancies? In RoI, in NI?

The should suck it up. Right? That is literally the choice open to them.

I spoke about this only once many moons ago on MN, under a different username.

12 years ago I found myself pregnant. I was young, new relationship, NOT ready to be a mother. I come from a strict RC background (Irish). I felt utterly helpless and alone.

I'll never forget going to the GP I attended at the time in Dublin. I started speaking and burst into tears. He took Marie Stopes leaflets and contact details from his desk drawer and handed them to me and talked me through the process of abortion at one of their clinics.

That's a GP in Ireland, whose only way to help a very young, very frightened girl with a monumental decision was to sneak her some information and a sticky note with the number for a clinic on there.

That man risked his entire career presumably. I mean, if he'd been caught he'd be fucked, right?

In the end, I didn't terminate the pregnancy but that was my choice. Only because he had to break the law to help give me a choice. That's not ok.

gone there's one glaring flaw in your logic about these women and that is that it is none of their fucking business.

As I said upthread; perhaps the woman who miscarried could have been under severe psychological strain that meant she was acting outside the norm (though I doubt it).

But ultimately, your stance of how it should be debated is, frankly, a load of shite. Why should it be debated? A termination at 10 weeks is not baby killing, whatever emotive language you want to assign to it.

You have every right in the world to decide what to do with your own body and your own pregnancies. Why do you have the sheer audacity to think you get to debate and decide what another perfect stranger does with hers?

Oh and why do you have to be raped to qualify for the poor mental health stuff.

There will be women who have been raped who mentally would be able to cope with continuing the pregnancy. There would be women who were not raped who wouldn't cope with being pregnant. More women who have been raped might suffer from poor mental health but its not the exclusive preserve of those who have been raped.

Surely the important bit is the mental health bit not the raped bit.

And do not get me started on how poor and inequal maternal maternal health provision is in the UK. NI comes a first bottom of the pile in other areas of maternal health apart from the abortion debate. Which speaks a few volumes.

Did the woman in question actually ask her to bring a scissors to her room as "the pest" was dangling and she wanted to cut it? (this is what flatmate told media.)

No, that has to be a lie by the flatmate. 10-12 week old foetuses don't have long umbilical cords.

that it is none of their fucking business.

Rubbish. They had been given the information. They knew what was happening-didn't have a choice not to know. There are many examples in history where people have said 'I didn't do anything because it was nothing to do with me,' while others have said, 'I knew it was happening and that put me under an obligation'. At the very least, if it was none of their business, you would have thought she could have bothered to put the bin out that day, wouldn't you?

Actually, in the majority of UK a foetus can be aborted to term for several reasons. Not just for foetal abnormality. They can't be carried out in NI at all, for any reason.

90% of abortions are carried out before 13 weeks gestation

98% of them before 20 weeks.

Late term abortions are a red herring. A scare tactic used by people who can't answer simple questions. A 10-12 week old foetus is not a 38 week one. The question was asked upthread gone, try answering it.

don't laugh That is truly horrendous. I don't think clinical practice can ever operate in a moral vacuum though.

Redtooth I had a recent pdf of statistics from bpas but I lost it when my kindle gave up the ghost.
I found this on a review of evidence by the prochoice forum:

• The percentage of all abortions performed at 20 or more weeks is small. It has remained at between 1 and 1.6 % of the total number of terminations for many years. In England and Wales in 2002 there were 175, 932 abortions of which 2,874 were performed at 20 weeks and above. Over the past two decades the number performed after 24 completed weeks has varied from 60 to 101.

augusta No I don't. Because lack of evidence

Gone, I assume this relates to my question about whether, if the foetus is a person, there should be an inquest whenever on of these people dies through miscarriage. However, lack of evidence is never a reason for failing to hold an inquest in relation to individuals who have been born, so I don't understand your logic.

Re the flatmates, have you outlined exactly what the lies were? And it wasn't exactly in public, was it, unless you know them?

The lies have been referred to repeatedly upthread; one obvious very blatant lie is the assertion that they could see that the foetus was male - you really wouldn't see that with a 10-12 week old foetus. And there's a lot of inconsistency in their stories about how they found the foetus.

How can you claim that they weren't lying in public? They've given newspaper interviews. And I'm not sure how lying in private is in any way morally better.

Had they been given the information?
You don't know that.
You know that they claim the poor woman confided in the flat mates that she had bought the drugs. You know they also claim to have been able to identify facial features and genitals on a 10 week foetus, which all of us who have had to see 10+ week foetuses is total bullshit.
They also claim they could identify this after the remains had been sat in a room temperature bin for a week. Again, total bullshit.

So you don't know they didn't root through her bin, open her post, hack her email, go through her phone.

They aren't a red herring - or if they are, there are plenty of red herrings that could be put to the other side also. I'm not putting them because I know there aren't any answers and I have a demanding small person at my side.

The late term thing is helpful, not in scoring points, but to highlight that there's something wrong with the principles underlying this system - the principles that say , 'ok, if a woman has a right to decide anything that happens in her body, this is ok'. Look at where this disregard for life has already taken us, in terms of what it's (apparently) morally acceptable to do in this country (I presume that when something's legal there's acknowledgement that it's legal because it's an ok thing to be happening?). I apologise for the drastic comparison, but look at the arguments that were made regarding the Jews in the last war. They were seen as impinging on the rights of those who were not Jews, and anything was acceptable in eradicating them on the basis of this, If someone wanted to stand up and object, they were open to being accused of hating everyone who was not a Jew. I don't deny women are victims when it comes to child-bearing, but I don't think victims is all that they are, or that they are the only victims.

Strangely, and I am addressing this to Gone, I do appreciate the situation which those women were facing. It is very traumatic for them to know what was happening, they very CLEARLY didn't have the tools to deal with it, and from reading the 38 year old's interview, her use of language and her description of her own reactions (I found her use of language was quite childlike in some ways, which please understand is not a criticism, but an observation) led me to believe she was not very capable of dealing with unknown situations or that perhaps she was used to others dealing with them for her. Perhaps not. I am surmising.
I have not seen any references to scissors or chords, however if they were indeed present with that scenario then there is no question there are 3 traumatised women from this case.
What baffles me is the police call, as opposed to contacting a hospital, or GP.
It does smack of self serving justification, perhaps fear of being criminalised also, or perhaps fear of the unknown. Or a sense of justification.
We may never know, and the interviews they gave subsequently certainly did no favours to themselves.

wow we are scraping the bottom of the barrel now
the Jews in the last war

Gone
I don't think clinical practice can ever operate in a moral vacuum though.
Perhaps. It should operate in a religious vacuum though.

Sorry gone, can you just clarify if you have actually just tried to make a direct comparison between the holocaust and a woman having a late termination?
Did you actually just do that?

How is it different? How is it different? You have described your baby, or whatever term you would prefer, as having 'no brain'. There was no potential future life, whatsoever, I'm imagining

I really don't want to cause further distress to very or anyone else who has gone through what she has, but your position on this is illogical, gone. If every life has to be preserved, whether before or after birth, your position logically should be than there is no right to abort an anencephalic foetus. Why does the fact that the baby may not survive birth make a difference to that principle? At what point in the scale between anencephalty and Down Syndrome does an abortion stop being justifiable? Bearing in mind that in fact some anencephalic babies do in fact survive.