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/

Well it wasn't fully clear. ScrollingLeaves has said she was talking about Mayo, and I thought 'specific case' meant you were also. I understand I misunderstood.

I don't think what happened to Mayo was statutory rape though: I don't think this is a crime here if the partner is similar age, and Mayo was over 13. If she had been under, it would have been different. It's possible she was coerced but we don't know enough to say that.

The case did definitely show that she had been having sex far too young and for whatever reason felt unable to share the news with the father.

How is it not rape if the law states nobody can consent until they are 16?

Can I clarify : when you talk about hormonal shifts, post partum psychosis : do you mean Carla Foster or Paris Mayo? Or both?

I do know that being a parent to a child with autism can be incredibly hard. But Foster had the option of aborting pre 24 weeks. And by the time she chose abortion, labour had to happen one way or another. She could have asked for an induced labour. She could have refused to care for the baby once they were born and given them up for abortion. These choices are extremely hard too, but they are there, and being in a difficult situation doesn't mean Foster had no option but to make the choice she did.

If a 14yo girl has sex with a 15yo boy, or similar, that is not automatically treated as rape, and rightly so, I think. If an older man has sex with her, it is, again, rightly imo.
Paris Mayo was 13 when she was having sex with a similar aged partner. This is painfully young but doesn't necessarily mean she was coerced, this doesn't seem to have been raised by the defence.

If she had been below 13 it would automatically have been rape whether she consented or not.

Re the physical toll : I know this can be unimaginably hard. Again, I support abortion within the previous limits. Carla Foster did have that opportunity, instead she chose to wait until Labour had to happen, one way or another

@LilyYeCarveSuns

I see one mention of the foetus as a ‘non-parasite’. Where are all the comparisons to a parasite?

As for ‘evicted’, it was in response to a comment of yours saying that the foetus was, at that point, a separate person. I said in response to you, that in that case if it’s a separate person “therefore [it] should be able to be evicted” like any other person non-consensually inside another person’s body.

I’m not sure what’s so terrible about that language use.

So no, no one has been making the argument that foetuses are like parasites or without value, from what I’ve seen – they’ve said that a foetus does not have more value than the woman, nor should it have more rights than her, and they have compared the situation of being pregnant to other situations that result in non-consensual uses of a person’s body. There’s a difference.

As for your issue with the arguments:

The fact is that a dead person does have more bodily autonomy than a pregnant woman, and more right to cause the deaths of innocent people by refusing to allow their body to be used. That kind of discrepancy is important to highlight, as it goes to show that the argument anti-abortionists put forward isn’t about saving lives. Why do you have an issue with people pointing that out?

As for the analogies and questions asked – these were brought up when people were making irrational, inconsistent arguments, and couldn’t seem to understand that they had different rules for one situation than another, despite the breach of bodily autonomy being comparable in both situations.

Analogies and thought experiments are commonly used in discussions to get people to think about the moral framework beneath their decision making. Is it consistent? Is it rational? Is that morality or logic applied evenly across the board? If not, then how is your position defensible (answer: it’s not.)

I have answered every question asked of me, and addressed every major point. So why can’t you do the same? What can’t you answer: what course of action is morally right in a situation where a man will die without sex with a particular woman? Is it because you know that your answer would of course conflict with and undermine the argument you’re putting forward for why a pregnant woman shouldn’t be allowed to abort at any point in pregnancy? I think so.

what course of action is morally right in a situation where a man will die without sex with a particular woman?

"Let him die, and he may not lie with her" has it nailed.

Sigh. Of course. I shudder to think. I wonder what the posters on this thread, who using those same arguments against late term abortion but are in favour of early abortion, think of their arguments being used to argue against abortion altogether?

That's why I prefer a morally and rationally consistent argument, which involves the clear, bright line of birth. I'm even tentatively in favour of induced labour instead of abortion, at a point when the risk of long term complications from being born premature are very low.

But any argument that says pregnant women have an obligation that no one else in society has placed upon them, to provide the use of their body to another human in order to preserve its life, is dangerous. As that other thread shows.

Absolutely - but if pp admits that, then she negates her own argument against abortion.

Which is why such posters always turn their noses up at answering, and pretend it's because the question is 'silly' - except if it's so 'silly', then why not just answer it, and be done?

As early as page 5, you said to a poster who disagreed with you: "Is that maybe why you are finding it hard to acknowledge the loss of life involved?" when she mentioned that her miscarriages and ectopic pregnancy hadn't changed her pro-choice opinions, weaponising her pregnancy losses against her in a very nasty way.

Combined with other comments you've made, you don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining about 'basic respect for other posters'.

You think some people who support late term abortion would view Paris Mayo's killing of her baby as not as unacceptable? Surely not?
Due to the best interests of the mother? How is it in her best interest to murder a baby? And if people really think that, they need to reconsider. Once the baby is born they have equal rights, young mothers should be supported but so should babies.

I'm sorry, but I don't fully understand. Are you saying the killing of Stanley was not very different ethically to a late term abortion and so shouldn't have been treated as harshly?

I agree totally about Mayo's family being vile. I also agree about denial.

The stumbling block for me is psychosis. Maybe I'm misunderstanding hugely, but I just don't see how the psychosis was not obvious before. And if she killed Stanley during psychosis that began after birth, why did it go away with no treatment?

Personally I see it as unacceptable, but given the extenuating factors I'm not interested in criminalising the girl. Intensive support/supervision from a health based perspective seems far more beneficial.

It is unacceptable, but im thinking of the distinction between infanticide and murder. The judge/jury in Paris Mayo's case decided infanticide wasn't applicable so she was sentenced for murder. I wonder if from her perspective she thought that what she planned was more straightforward/easier to conceal than trying to obtain pills illegally. It's an upsetting case. Mental health/social support and an early abortion would have been in her best interest, if she didnt want to keep the baby.

I agree she'd been through trauma of birth and clearly had a terrible family. But neither of those things are an excuse for killing Stanley. What if a boy had been through an equal level of trauma through different things, was left holding a baby and killed them? Obviously it's hard to do an exact comparison hypothetical, but trauma ams a bad family don't excuse killing.

Unless you think she was psychotic when she did it? Possible but why were there no signs before? And why did it clear up after the killing, with no medical treatment?

Do you think she was in psychosis /not in her right mind and so it was infanticide? Possible,, but why did the psychosis clear up with no medical treatment?

And- ' more straightforward/easier' in her view to choke Stanley with cotton wool and kick him until he had car-crash level injuries? I'm sorry, killing may have seemed 'easier' to her but anyone with a moral compass wouldn't do that. Once you commit murder from convenience you pass the point of no return morally imo. She could have left Stanley at a safe haven, a GP surgery, anywhere would have been better than brutally murdering him.

If it was for that reason that's very different from psychosis. Psychosis would mean that she didn't mean to do it.

To be clear, I'm not excusing it.

I think the fact that you want to keep shifting to very specific cases where we don't know all the specifics isn't helpful. I wasn't referring to either of those cases. I was just generally listing just a few of the changes that can come with pregnancy and birth that unless you've experienced them it's very easy to sit back and say 'I don't believe in X' or that you would never do something. Just as until you have children of your own you may not understand the reasons many mothers seek abortion either not can you understand how a baby could be greatly wanted and then other circumstances or pregnancy side effects can massively alter your mindset. You have no idea what was going on in the lives of the women and girls you're talking about and I'd hope if you were ever in an unfortunate situation you treat yourself more kindly than you do them. I haven't said anywhere that Carla Foster had no option but to make the choice she did? I'm saying you cannot understand, and most of us probably couldn't, but I can't see the benefit of taking a mother away from her children and punishing her more severely than violent men after what she already admitted to and what must have been an awfully traumatic experience.

You're mistaking not wanting women to be criminalised with supporting late term abortion as though people are cheerleading for it.

I'm curious where you found so much info on these cases. I've only read some news articles about Paris Mayo for example but nothing sharing her medical records enough for any of us to confidently state anything about her mental state. We don't know if it was psychosis or a side effect of pregnancy denial, and I don't think as the public we're entitled to know any care or treatment she might have received afterwards. I think one good thing about this change in legislation is it will hopefully stop women's life experience being dragged into the press for people to make judgements on with little info.

We dont know all the specifics of the case but I dont remember it being suggested that she was psychotic. And im not excusing what she did. It was cruel.

The 2 threads about the case on Mumsnet contained extensive debates over whether she had post partum psychosis. Some posters seemed very convinced she had & gave links saying her behaviour matched. I was unconvinced though- it just seems unlikely psychosis would have presented just after the birth but then apparently stopped shortly after. As you say, it could have been something else.

See, I think a situation as sad and awful as that shouldn't be trawled over by randomers online.

PPP can present transiently and is triggered as much by hormonal factors as anything else. So it's not impossible. I think, though, that the main issue with that case was not medical, but legal, in that the judge may have failed to properly instruct the jury that, for a murder conviction, the prosecution were required to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she didn't have PPP (the defence expert testified that she had at least one symptom). There's an appeal planned, according to local press reports.

I'm one of the posters that's OK with the current law and term limits (though I think 24 weeks is on the low side), but for practical rather than moral reasons: I don't think unborn babies are sacred and I do care about distressed women in late pregnancy - but they are rare, and could be helped without killing the fœtus.

I agree that abortion on demand up to full term is morally consistent, because a blastocyst and a full term fœtus are of equal worth, in that they carry equal potential. The difference is in the sacrifice required of the woman (in terms of morbidity/mortality risk, social consequences, and the experience of gestation and delivery) in order for that potential to be realised.

By 28 weeks (say), the woman has already suffered most of the medical and social consequences. Her body has changed, she is visibly pregnant, and she is unavoidably committed to going through delivery. For her to continue to be pregnant for another 9 to 12 weeks is not a big concession.

As full term approaches, the medical consequences, and the woman's subjective experience, converge for the two possible outcomes - of live birth and deliberately induced stillbirth - to the point where the only real difference between the two scenarios is in whether the child is alive or not.

Rationally, even if we accept that the woman's welfare is paramount, I would still like to know - how does it assist her welfare for a child to be dead rather than alive (all other things being equal)?