Bid in Lords to overturn move to decriminalise abortion for women

[IwantToRetire]

A landmark move to decriminalise women terminating their own pregnancies could be overturned as legislation is considered in the House of Lords.

In June, MPs in the Commons voted in favour of decriminalisation, with one saying it would remove the threat of “investigation, arrest, prosecution or imprisonment” of any woman who acts in relation to her own pregnancy. ...

But, with the Bill making its way through the Lords, an amendment has been tabled to remove the relevant clause. ...

https://nation.cymru/news/bid-in-lords-to-overturn-move-to-decriminalise-abortion-for-women/

The situation where the level of suffering outweighs their interest in continuing to live. Obviously, assessing this is an imprecise art, and will factor in the possible degree of disability, and whether the parents can cope. So, a wanted baby might be given every possible treatment, even if a slim chance, and the same baby, unwanted, might be allowed to die with dignity. Both scenarios would be legal.

Can you expand on your reasons behind making such a statement? I and others who you're calling people with social capital securing their own access to abortion are actually those who support the guidance of RCOG and BPAS and countless other organisations because they're experts and they've stated how and why they think this law change actually protects more vulnerable women especially abuse victims. I'm struggling to see how logically you're twisting that to mean we don't care about vulnerable women. I also don't know how you've decided I or other have more social capital than others - based on what? When were the ones reminding other posters of the unintended harms their POV has on vulnerable, poor, disabled or abused women? You're also I see not able to counter the reality that the majority of antichociers are conservative and don't support benefits etc post birth.

@LilyYeCarveSuns Id also argue that those arguing to be pro choice at early stages and anti choice at later stages are actually the women with privilege securing their own access to early abortion because they know they have the money to access it or live in areas where it's available and they don't seem to acknowledge it care about the women who live in rural areas or work shift or night work on low incomes who are then less able to access abortion as early

There are other aspects of law where intent is irrelevant to whether something is a crime. If I take prescription meds that make me sleepy and then drive, whether I meant to kill the child I might run over won't matter when I'm in court, and rightly so. It's well-known that some medications impair driving and the patient is responsible for making sure that they aren't adversely affected.

It's well-known that smoking harms the foetus-as-future-person, but we don't criminalise pregnant women who smoke. Why should the woman's intent make her a criminal in one specific circumstance, especially when the risk of genuine stillbirth being misascribed to self-abortion and resulting in police investigation is so high?

This is really a moot point thought because the law has decided actually what she didn't isn't criminal anymore and yet you're here arguing against the experts and refusing to apply any of your zeal for prosecuting people or restricting peoples autonomy to men. You don't need to condone misogyny, you're literally doing it.

This bit : ' I would hope that, in the specific example you give, the investigation would also ask how a "very young girl" came to be pregnant and avoiding prenatal care in the first place and that the judge would consider her age and the fact that she has been raped underage, possibly incestuously, as mitigation when sentencing.

Every single abortion starts with a man or boy putting his dick into a woman or girl. Every single one.'

Are you thinking of Paris Mayo?

I read up on that case...terrible. I didn't think she was raped, though? I thought the consensus was she became pregnant from a relationship with another similar age teen. Teens that young shouldn't be having sex & her parents hadn't cared for her properly. But that doesn't make it automatically rape.

Or are you saying you think her father abused her? I didn't see that reported. It's possible though..

No one on the thread called a foetus a parasite. A pp mentioned the parasitical-type relationship and I expanded on it to explain why birth is a very hard distinction and easy to legislate around, compared to 'viability' where there is no clear line of distinction at all, it's a grey area. In common parlance the word parasite has a very negative connotation, but in biological terms it simply describes a type of organism that is dependent on its host to survive. It's a neutral term to describe how an organism lives. When I talk about a parastical-type relationship im referencing the clear biological difference in relationship between a foetus in its mother's womb and a born baby. There are scientific papers which discuss the similarities and differences of foetuses/pregnancy with typical parasites.

What do you mean by 'anti choice' though? Lily appears to suppprt the 24 week limit, no?

If anything but abortion with no limit is 'anti choice' to you, then a large percentage of the English population is.

I see. Wanted vs unwanted playing into doesn't feel right to me. The doctor should try just as hard to save if they're not wanted imo.

I was talking about Paris Mayo.
What a travesty of justice. It is horrendous.

So was the clamouring for her punishment.
It is unbelievably hypocritical.

I've been reading the threads. I understand you think she had postpartum psychosis- it definitely seems this option was not explored enough in court.

Was she raped though, let alone by her father? I couldn't find evidence of that. Her situation was clearly horrible at home.

Exactly this, criminalising late term abortions just punishes more vulnerable women who for whatever reason lacked the wherewithal to avoid getting into that situation in the first place.

It might be clearer that they aren't anti choice of they didn't repay the usual anti choice rhetoric and refuse to engage with any of the meaningful replies posters gave them about misogyny, instead like many others on this thread as soon as they're contradictions around redistricting women in some way are pointed out they flip to a different angle, so it went from harm to foetuses being the issue to the intrinsic value of a a fetus all of which can be applied to an early termination.
I disagree with your opinion of England tbh, the majority of the UK when surveyed support access to abortion and don't think it should be an issue of law. What I see as overall antichocie is those who have their own philosophical beliefs that they want to apply to others bodies whether thats before or after 24 weeks..make that choice for yourself in your own pregnancies and stay out of everyone else's. Can you clarify if you've gone through pregnancy or labour?

Not yet - I'm only 20. I want to have kids one day though.
I think it's coherent to say more developed foetuses in third trimester and qualitative different from first & then second. The ball of cells in the early weeks, to be extreme, is clearly different from the well developed near-baby of the very late third trimester.

"And I know lots of people who work incredibly hard for the well-being of children, and towards a more just society generally, who don't share your bodily autonomy absolutism. They're not shouting anything from rooftops - I don't know what you're talking about. I get the feeling you're not really interacting with me, you've got some idea of an Evil Repubilcan Patriarch in mind, and you're in a game of rhetorical point scoring"

I agree. I gave up with this thread some time ago....This has not been agood faith discussion. Other people's posts have been contemptuously dismissed and not even genuinely engaged with. We've been positioned as being either conservative, right wing bigots who don't believe in a woman's right to choose, or even as men. And there has been some unnecessarily personal and really quite 'mean girl bitchiness' going on. I personally expect a higher level of critical thinking and engagement - along with some basic ground rules of respect for other posters.

She wasn’t raped, and it wasn’t incest. She was just young girl in a dysfunctional family with an unpleasant and ill father.

Her whole pregnancy went unnoticed. Would you not know your daughter was pregnant if you had one?

Hers was a classic case of denied pregnancy and what should have been an indictment of infanticide which has a different burden of proof from ordinary murder.

Instead she was charged with murder by the CPS.
It was only just before the verdict, and a very dodgy psychologist’s report on the basis of a video of her in the police station where he decided ‘she didn’t look upset’ the morning after her night of giving birth and killing the baby, that the judge told the jury they could decide it was infanticide - not that that meant they were instructed in how to understand Infanticide or that the whole trial would have taken a different course from the outset had that been the charge.

If only she had taken abortion pills instead, even at that last stage, or a doctor had carried out feticide prior to administrating the pills.

She was 14 when she did it but, because of covid, tried when she was 19 and treated like an adult who had done it. Just awful.

Denied pregnancy/infanticide has a known correlation. She needed to be put in a psychological institution and treated, not sent to prison.

What I am meaning to say is that I find it hypocritical that abortion pills leading to hypoxia ( suffocation) of the soon to be born baby, or a doctor killing it first with an injection, would be deemed acceptable, but what that girl seen to be unutterably unacceptable.

Of course the latter is not acceptable ( though I consider it to be Infanticide rather than Murder.) I find it deeply troubling however that the former is seen as being entirely different unless it is more or less essential for the mother and/or baby.

@Shortshriftandlethal I do find your last post a bit rich given that you tried to suggest I was non binary because you couldn't distinguish between bodily autonomy and personal autonomy. And that the rationale of absolute bodily autonomy in pregnancy boils down to 'penis envy'.

That's a very unfair judgement imo. People genuinely engaged with your posts multiple times asking you to explain your point that your personal opinion on the abortion limit was actually imposed by nature. You also laid some pretty unnecessary personal attacks on posters who disagreed with you that we resent men or being female or that we must be non binary or support PBs, just really wild accusations rather than engage in a discussion about your point. I didn't see anyone call you conservative or right wing either? Personally I was really interested to hear your viewpoint in full to understand where you were coming from and was quite disappointed you refused to engage and got quite mean spirited if anyone asked a question of you.

I think the people who would find the former acceptable would not find the latter so entirely unacceptable because in both cases they would be looking at what's in the best interest of the mother.
I think others would view both scenarios as terribly unacceptable.

So in fairness you don't actually understand or can relate to any of the scenarios these women have been through that you find very black and white such as hormonal shifts, post partum psychosis or being a parent to a child with additional needs? Or can relate to the absolute physical toll of pregnancy or birth which may seem simple in an idealised world to have consented to when you have sex but not so much when real world circumstances are complex? Not to say you can't have your opinion but surely you can see how you're being very black and white on a major physical experience a woman has that you don't know how you would personally cope with.

Self-induced late abortions are vanishly rare. There is no evidence that decriminalising such acts reduces the number of times they occur. So, we have two choices: investigate and potentially imprison women who have still births post 24 weeks, or decriminalise late abortions.

Decriminalisation is not innovative, many countries have them. It also doesn't affect the current 24 week limit which providers have to abide by.

On the basis that decriminalisation doesn't disincentivise self-induced late abortion, the only possible justification is that they should be punished.

Even if we consider that they should be punished (I don't) for the overall good for women's autonomy and health, decriminalisation of late term self induced abortions is the right choice.

I agree, I was interested to hear shortshrift's points because I felt like it was the one of the closest points we got to in the thread about justification for an abortion limit part way through pregnancy in philosophical terms, and how feminism sits within that reasoning. I was put off engaging more because of being treated with suspicion about being NB and a sense (perhaps wrongly I don't know) that my posts were being wilfully misinterpreted (although tbf that wasn't only short).

@Shortshriftandlethal doesn’t engaged in good faith. She implied that my views about pregnancy/abortionIs are influenced because I find it “hard to acknowledge the loss of life involved” because of my miscarriages/ectopic.

I wasn't talking about any case in particular. That you were explains your otherwise-oddly specific set of circumstances offered as an example.

Statutory rape is still rape.