http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/08/opinion/pregnant-and-no-civil-rights.html Based on the belief that he had an obligation to give a fetus a chance for life, a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered a critically ill 27-year-old woman who was 26 weeks pregnant to undergo a cesarean section, which he understood might kill her. Neither the woman nor her baby survived. In Iowa, a pregnant woman who fell down a flight of stairs was reported to the police after seeking help at a hospital. She was arrested for attempted fetal homicide. In Utah, a woman gave birth to twins; one was stillborn. Health care providers believed that the stillbirth was the result of the womans decision to delay having a cesarean. She was arrested on charges of fetal homicide. In Louisiana, a woman who went to the hospital for unexplained vaginal bleeding was locked up for over a year on charges of second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy I do not understand how any thinking, rational person can believe that what is happening to these women is not absolutely insane and completely unacceptable
What's ironic is.... Tennesseeans passing an anti-abortion amendment.....but they also re-nominated and re-elected Scott DesJarlais to the US House....who had obtained an abortion for his wife some years back. DesJarlais naturally is a "pro-life" Republican.
I think we need to protect the civil rights of those not yet born. This is a problem with many laws. Because often times a new law effectively criminalizes actions or situations which are not actually illegal. It is important that abortion laws be worded carefully so that people who have done nothing illegal do not get caught up in the net. It has to do with burden of proof. And some types of laws lend themselves more easily to misuse than other types. The fact that laws have the potential to be used against people who did not do anything illegal is definitely something we need to consider before passing new laws. This is not just a problem when it comes to abortion. In what seems to be a disturbing trend, courts in the U.S. are more and more abusing their powers and putting people in jail on inadequate evidence. The government should not just be going after people based on the slightest suspicion they might have broken the law. To some extent, it's really more a problem with the court system. Judges are too often indifferent and prosecutors are incentivized to win as many cases as possible.
Great post. Key words: "thinking and rational"....no, people who want to control women's lives and medical procedures are neither.
It is insane. The prosecutors bringing the charges against these women are insane, and the judges are completely negligent. Unfortunately this type of thing is not a rare occurrence in the U.S. court system. It is most likely that laws need to be much more carefully worded to avoid this type of abuse by those administering the law. When it comes to some laws, the discretionary powers of the court need to be curtailed. And yes, indeed, I will admit that often times when the government makes a law, it is a bad law, and results in a worse outcome than if that law had never been made. I still wish there was a way to protect fetuses though, without over-punishment or going after innocent women.
All anti-abortion laws are bad laws; they all "go after innocent women." And they don't reduce the abortion rate.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about civil rights, somehow I don't think he was talking about abortion. Getting an abortion is not a civil right.
That's because you believe women are objects to be regulated, with no right to bodily integrity. There is no way of knowing MLK's opinion of abortion, but he did support Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights.
And where abortion laws allow for medical exceptions they rapidly become unenforceable and useless. This is what has happened here and elsewhere throughout the world
All the horror, injustice, and loss of human rights those women suffered was directly caused by misogynists who think women should be "punished" for having sex, the incorrectly named "pro-lifers". Self-righteous busybodies with no life of their own and a sick need to control women and inflict suffering on others . These vicious acts perpetrated on women may end if these women start filing suit and costing the state money.....that's one reason that laws got passed making it illegal for men to beat their wives ....women sued when the law didn't protect them as equally as everyone else.. And young women should pull their head out of their texting and start paying attention to the faction that wants to end their human rights...pay attention to what party to vote for...or pay the price of inattention...
I'm a bit late to the party here, but my God, what was described in the OP is pure insanity. That's what happens when you just turn off the old grey matter because logic is a nuisance. But honestly this is what the future will be. All in utero deaths would need to be investigated and not even because miscarriages would be illegal(which they very well could end up being in some places if the bleach sniffers who champion that sort of thing have their way), but simply because when a person dies, there is an investigation to determine cause of death. Natural causes are natural causes but each miscarriage would have to be investigated to determine if it was indeed a natural cause and not something initiated or catalyzed by the woman because then that would entail assault or murder charges and whatever other insanity can be invented to criminalize the situation. This is one implication that comes with personhood, but nobody likes to talk about that. It would interfere with the unspoken goal of turning a fetus into a PIADO. Person-in-abortion-debates-only. Because lets face it, that's really what we're talking about, even the lifers, when we talk about personhood. One little change to the law piggybacked on a hoax of an idea, one whose proponents don't even buy into it beyond their own necessity, all with the very specific goal of usurping control of a woman's body from her.
That's not how it has to be, that's not how it is in all places. If a 95 year old woman suddenly falls over dead, you think they try to determine the cause of death? Babies can die from sudden infant death syndrome, not all that uncommon. You think they investigate every baby that died? Usually they only investigate if there's something suspicious or if there was a motive.
Yes they do. Yes they do - http://www.cdc.gov/sids/pdf/suidmanual/chapter9_tag508.pdf Any and all unexplained deaths are investigated
Very provocative op-ed piece that stirs outrage and leaves much unanswered at the same time. The elements of the specific crimes charged and the individuals' pre-arrest behavior would be important considerations. The judge ordering a birth is very interesting too. What legal text caused he or she to make that decision? No matter, somewhere in it human failing will be at the heart of the err.
To which category do you assign Roe vs Wade? I think everyone has forgotten that it also validates the restriction and regulation by states of abortion regardless of a woman's right to do with her own body as she sees fit. This wasn't a vindication, it was a compromise. Um, there is a whole trimester of banning going on in Roe that no one seems to acknowledge, let alone scream about. Where are the marchers demanding that this sacred inviolate right to choose be expanded until the day a woman's water breaks?
Anti-abortion laws hurt all women, even those whose pregnancies are wanted. There is no need for them as evidenced by the lower abortion rate in Canada where there are no abortion laws. Women don't choose late term abortion except for medical reasons.
Lets just focus on what Roe does not do. it does not affirm the right of a woman to decide what to do with her body regardless of the existence or lack of a fetus. it affords states the right to regulate exactly why a woman can and cannot abort after viability and it affords those states a right to legislate a 'right to life' to the unborn in the last trimester excepting cases when a woman's health is jeopardized. Now it is nice that you feel comforted that few women will be impeded from a medical procedure that they will actually want. because it is rare choice. It is still denied based on a balance with two competing rights. We often sell Roe as something it wasn't and on reasoning that the Court did not actually subscribe to.
In Roe v. Wade the Court said that a fetus is not a person but "potential life", and thus does not have constitutional rights of its own. After viability, RvW balances the woman's right to abortion with state interests in regulation. "The Court identified those state interests as protecting women’s health and protecting the “potentiality” of life. The Court developed a way to balance the woman’s right to abortion against these governmental interests: prior to fetal viability, a state could only regulate abortion if necessary to protect a woman’s health, such as licensing doctors. After fetal viability, a government could regulate and even ban abortion to further its interest in the potentiality of life, but it must safeguard a woman’s life and a woman’s health." http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/nwlc_roe_abortion_factsheet.pdf
I know what the decision said. There is nothing remotely inconsistent between my post and yours. Reread it. The state interest is in protecting the potentiality of life from certain death, which becomes a right to life for the unborn, regardless of a womans 'right to do as she pleases with her own body', or 'make her own medical decisions' in the last trimester, limited by an exception based on jeopardy to the woman's health. We tend to throw out those clichés which are loosely based on predictable affects of Roe in the first trimester. By the way. I am curious how you prove which women do or do not 'want' an abortion for non medical reasons? It would seem a tricky thing to establish, considering that you can't determine it based on actual behavior or claims without biased results.
No, it doesn't "become a right to life for the unborn;" because potential life can't have constitutional rights. Why is it so important to you to define protection of potentiality as a "right" of the unborn? If the unborn had any such "right to life," there could be no exception for the health and life of the woman. Women simply don't suffer through months of pregnancy, then decide to abort on a whim. Late term abortions are wanted pregnancies that go wrong.
The Constitution doesn't confer rights of any kind to potential life. It does not grant potential life a right to be sustained by the body of another. No born person has that right. Every single right envisioned in the Constitution applies to born individuals. I wasn't talking about women who may "want late term abortions (but)..never ask for one." That is irrelevant. I was talking about women who actually seek late term abortions. They don't do it on a whim after suffering long months of pregnancy. Abortions at late term are more dangerous, more expensive, and strictly regulated. There are only a handful of late term abortion providers in the country. Dr. Warren Hern explains how the numbers and reasons for late term abortions have been distorted: "Third-trimester abortions are extremely uncommon; fewer than 600 are performed per year. This irrefutable fact is documented by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), the institution acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control as having the most complete information on abortion practice. When Richard Cohen wrote in a June 1995 op-ed column that just four one-hundredths of one percent of abortions are performed after 24 weeks, and that most, if not all, are performed because the fetus is found to be severely damanged or because the life of the mother is clearly in danger, he was absolutely correct. The AGI statistics Cohen quoted are accurate. If anything, the extimates overstate the actual number of third-trimester abortions. In my own practice, which is internationally known as specializing in late abortion, I have only performed about a dozen abortions for women whose pregnancies were advanced beyond 26 weeks so far this year, and I never have performed more than about 50 in a given year. In every single case, there was some compelling medical reason for the abortion. On the day before the Senate voted on the so-called partial-birth abortion bill last month, I performed an abortion for a woman who came with her husband from Europe to end a 33-week pregnancy that was threatening her life. The pregnancy was deeply desired by the couple, but the fetus was severely impaired, and the womans life would have been at great risk if she had continued until term." http://www.drhern.com/abnumbers.htm
Would women prefer to go and have kids to get money on welfare, if they could apply for unemployment compensation that clears our poverty guidelines whenever they may find themselves unemployed, instead.
I'd like to see links to the actual stories. I believe from googling, that these are not truthful. They are floating all over the internet on pro-abortion sites like gossup---but nothing to back it up. The closest I could find to an actual event was the case of the woman who went to the hospital with vaginal bleeding. She admitted that a baby was born and that it was alive. So obviously Louisana thought she had gave birth to a baby and let it die. A born baby does have rights for sure...and that is why she was arrested. This part of the story is not mentioned on most of the sites---and the story is getting scrapped up and placed on sites with relevent information purposely left off. The New York times oughta show more credibility but evidently they believe everything on the internet is true.
