Jailing a mother of three - WTF

[Capitalismwantsyou]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/12/woman-in-uk-jailed-for-28-months-over-taking-abortion-pills-after-legal-time-limit

111 was answering calls throughout and would arrange GP phone calls or appointments with clinics etc. GP surgeries were never the only option.

At 45 I'd assume perimenopause rather than pregnancy tbh no matter how many children I had. She shouldn't have had to cover it up, there should be no threat of prosecution for a woman who had an abortion.

For context, she was clearly in her "right mind" to do internet searches and knew how far gone she was:-

The prosecution said Foster made a number of internet searches between February and May 2020, including "how to hide a pregnancy bump", "how to have an abortion without going to the doctor" and "how to lose a baby at six months"

This is simply untrue. She did not make a mistake in her dates, and she was able to access healthcare. It would help if you were able to stick to the facts of the case rather than trying to conjure up a more sympathetic fiction. I'm not particularly punitively minded (if that's the right way to put it), I don't know the full details of this woman's 'story' or see the point in giving her prison sentence except vaguely as a deterrent, if that even works for something like this. But be real please: she knew her dates and she had ample opportunity to obtain an abortion months beforehand.

What were the other options like?

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/covid-19/what-the-bma-is-doing/covid-19-impact-of-the-pandemic-on-healthcare-delivery

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/hospital-outpatient-activity/2020-21/covid-19-impact

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58670560.amp

Surely people haven't forgotten what it was like.

“At 45 I'd assume perimenopause rather than pregnancy tbh no matter how many children I had. She shouldn't have had to cover it up, there should be no threat of prosecution for a woman who had an abortion.”

She didn’t, as was proven in court. At 59 and postmenopause, I would certainly have known the difference. Menopausal women’s abdomen’s generally don’t move internally.

You may not believe in prosecution for late stage self-administered abortion but I don’t understand why you and other poster’s continue to pretend this particular case was an innocent mistake when it’s been proven beyond doubt in court that it was not. It was a deliberate, calculated act.

Alltheprettyseahorses · Today 10:32
Badbadbunny · Today 10:20

111 was answering calls throughout and would arrange GP phone calls or appointments with clinics etc. GP surgeries were never the only option.

“What were the other options like?”

For a start, taking the abortion pill months earlier.

She said she didn't think she was so far along. The use of 'deterrent' is interesting. This is such a rare case, unique even, what on earth would others be deterred from? Having an abortion at all in case eg they're further along than they think and they might be reported or something, young and got the message they would be punished, or being left with the vague impression it's illegal because they think a woman was jailed for having one but they don't know the full details (which most won't)?

“She said she didn't think she was so far along. “

She was lying. Her google history proved that in court.

Please stop trying to create a false narrative.

By that reasoning, all IVF embryos must be implanted into a woman's uterus at some point because destroying them is worse than being born to someone who doesn't want them. Luckily, Parliament understood the importance of considering the life that the child will have if born when writing HFEA90 and didn't mandate this.

I've kread a lot of threads on here about women who say they have trapped wind that feels exactly like a baby kicking. I also genuinely don't remember noticing my bump moving from the outside when I was pregnant, it probably did thinking about it but I mustn't have noticed. Plus, I imagine women at the start of perimenopause know somewhat less about what it will be like for them than they will looking back on it a decade or so later.

I agree with you 100%.

Where is the line? What if she gave birth then clubbed the bab to death? Or her partner abused her and the foetus lost her life?

Mental health must always be kept in mind. But criminal intentionality must be attended to.

Exactly

Women are actively encouraged to abort at a late stage if the baby has down syndrome. Why are those lives less valid?

I am 36 weeks pregnant and have noticed my baby kicking since 20 weeks. Earlier than that it felt like little flutters/trapped wind. Since around 28 weeks the kicks have been very hard. Definitely feels like a small human kicking me and absolutely nothing like trapped wind. More recently I have seen the kicks by looking at my bump.

Women on this thread need to stop making excuses for a woman who deliberately chose very late term abortion. She knew how far along she was and could’ve asked for help in her first trimester. She deserves a prison sentence because her baby could’ve survived outside the womb.

I literally said I doubt it does function as much of a deterrent, but in any case your examples seem pretty spurious. Nobody is under the impression abortion is illegal, and even if all they saw was a headline they would be perfectly aware this was a highly unusual case. Nobody has to guess how far along they are either. If you're pregnant and don't want to be and you somehow read half a headline and got confused, healthcare professionals exist and so does Google. Why do you keep making things up? Should all our laws be based on a hypothetical person who can't some understand basic facts?

They're not, and I think it's pretty awful tbh. Obviously it can be very very tough to have a child with a disability but this has nothing to do with choices over bodily autonomy and everything to do with choosing what kind of child you're prepared to look after.

Also, it's only with modern technology that babies can survive if born at 34 weeks. So, are we saying that women have less rights because of improvement in neonatal care?

I haven't seen anyone suggesting we don't allow abortions at all, or even arguing for a decrease in the limit so your IVF embryos example has nothing to do with this discussion about late term abortion.

Also, it's only with modern technology that babies can survive if born at 34 weeks.

Not really, our son was born at 34 weeks and had less than one day in the SCBU only as a precaution, just monitored. Born at 3pm on the Monday, and handed over to me on the ward on Tuesday morning, no drama at all, baby handed to me as normal after birth and then taken away for "monitoring". The only "modern technology" was being hooked up to a heart monitor and blood oxygen monitor. I seem to remember some kind of injection being given to develop his lungs, but can't remember whether that was given to me before birth, or him directly after birth. Other than that, it was "just another day at the office" for myself and the midwives/doctors, etc.

I agree with this.

I don't think it does any good to call people who are basically fine with abortion up to viability anti-abortion/pro-life/forced birthers.
All it does is push away moderate people.

If that happened then wouldn’t you have an abortion before 20 weeks?

I'd hope so. But I don't have perfect knowledge of future-me's state of mind. No human does, especially when under stress. Most women think they'd report a rape, yet only 5-10% of rapes are reported. I'd always said that I'd fight back, but what actually happened was that I froze, whimpered "no" and "stop" a couple of times, and started to cry.

I'm in my forties, so future-me would be dealing with perimenopause or menopause. I have amenorrhea caused by my IUS, stopping me from using a late period as a warning. I've never been pregnant thanks to doubling up on contraception for most of my life, so future-me wouldn't know what pregnancy even feels like. So how would I know that my symptoms meant being pregnant and not just menopausal?

I'm autistic and have depression. Some days I don't have the motivation to even brush my teeth. I was meant to go for a dental check-up a month ago and still haven't booked it. If I'm scared of something or know it will be hard, I avoid it terribly. I've had some bad experiences with getting glasses made up and know that the optician exam-to-glasses-to-thesegivememigrainespleasefixthem-repeat process will be an ordeal; I once delayed an eye test for a year because I couldn't bring myself to deal with that ordeal. I've missed job application deadlines (part of my autism is that I really struggle with some types of application question), trains, buses, you name it. I was an hour late for a wedding reception last year because I had a panic attack at the thought of getting a train whilst wearing a skirt thanks to my sexual assault history.

So yes, whilst I hope that I'd magically somehow know that I was pregnant in time when I don't even have periods and would be lucid enough to deal with the referral process and not have a panic attack and end up missing the appointment, I can't guarantee that.

I do not consider myself fit to parent because I can barely look after myself some days, and this is why I double-up with LARC and a condom. Children should be raised by parents who want them, love them, and are competent to care for them. Even if I fell in love with my baby at birth, "doing my best" wouldn't be enough. A woman with my depression and tokophobia should not be put through a live birth only to have the baby adopted, especially as I would spend my life looking over my shoulder waiting for a letter or phone call from the baby. Adopters tend to want children with nice clean bill of health, not family histories of mental illness, suicides, alcoholism, autism, and migraine. My baby would probably be raised in care.

I read the circumstances here as she had left the father of the existing 3 children and become pregnant with the new chap. Lockdown forced her to move in with someone described as her “estranged ex” from whom she was trying to conceal the pregnancy. Clearly there was housing instability here and then the catastrophic collapse in lockdown in all the wraparound services she might have accessed - presumably she wasn’t leaving the house for antenatal care that could have signposted her to these services as she didn’t want the ex to know about the pregnancy and she had no excuse or reason to leave the house in lockdown.

desperately sad case and the sentencing remarks I suspect don’t even scrape the surface of how complex the situation is. Regardless, a custodial sentence is madness.

I don't think the law should be changed, I'm not sure really on my feelings around whether it's ethical to send a woman who was clearly in strife to prison for it; I do feel strongly that its cruel and inappropriate for her and her family for her to have been named in the media alongside details of her career and home though.

The anti-choice argument is based on the idea that life starts at fertilisation and the baby's right to life trumps the mother's right to bodily autonomy.

No one has ever yet convinced me that life doesn't start at fertilisation. That zygote, that single cell, is the very very start of a human's life. Which is why time limits make no sense. If you consider an IVF embryo to be a really tiny human, your argument for not implanting it into a woman has to be based in something other than "it's the commissioning parents' property".

One of the conditions of legally implanting an IVF embryo into a woman is that the welfare of the child, once it is born and has an existence independent of the mother, must be considered. This is the law, it's in HFEA90. No implantation, no live birth, no child existing independently of the woman's body, no welfare to have to consider.

When making healthcare decisions about pregnant women, the welfare of the child, once it is born and has an existence independent of that of the mother, must be considered. This is why there are certain medications that pregnant women are not allowed to take. This is why women needing to start cancer treatments during pregnancy must abort their wanted babies. This is the same legal principle that governs implantation of embryos under HFEA90, which is why I compared the two: no live birth, no child existing independently of the woman's body, no welfare to have to consider.

With a deliberate pre-term live delivery, there's a live birth, there's a child existing independently of the woman's body, there's child welfare to have to consider. At which point, the obstetrician says "no, I'm not doing that, stay pregnant to full term".