315
Nebraska US mother sentenced to two years in prison for giving daughter abortion pills
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
315 points (95.1% liked)
News
23259 readers
2805 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fuck that. Women have bodily autonomy. Period. No "but", they just do. None of your things to consider matter at all except that a law which criminalizes women's bodily autonomy at 20 weeks forced them to take medical risks they shouldn't have had to take.
You won't ever get a majority of the population to agree to this view. If you hold staunchly that all the way up until 40 weeks women should be allowed to abort, you will lose at least 75% of the vote. At some point the fetus is developed enough we have to consider its life, regardless of its current location.
I think we could push viability as a compromise for everyone. That's around 21-24 weeks, depending on what is considered acceptable potential life chance. Conservatives will say that's too developed, some progressives will claim your view, but I think most would at least compromise that if we could safely take the baby out, that should be the legal option at that point. That also gives the mother a lot of time to consider her options.
Many fatal fetal anomalies aren't detected until the scan done between 18-23 weeks. So that doesn't "give the mother a lot of time." Especially in states that add legal hoops for her to jump through, and where the nearest place to perform an abortion is several hundred miles away in another state. Usually in those cases she's forced to put the dying fetus through much more trauma, as well as the risk to her own health and life. You can tell yourself they'll make exceptions in those cases but the reality is they won't act until she's crashing from sepsis, because they fear (with good reason) being reported and arrested and losing their license.
"Do women have bodily autonomy" is a yes or no question. You're implicitly adopting the framing that says "no, they don't", which is why you think there's some need to compromise to be moderate.
The answer to "do you have the right to withhold your labor" isn't "not if it's only for a few months", it's "yes".
Women can end pregnancies without abortion. Just like America can have "territorial integrity" without putting floating barbed-wire meshes in the Rio Grand.
At six months were talking about more than a fetus. Baby has lungs, eyes that move around, and they listen to sounds coming from outside the woman's body. But sure, let's just rip 'em out and flush them so she can fit in jeans again. Sorry, but it's a little fucked up.
And at six months a woman still has bodily autonomy. Period. End of story. That you think a more developed fetus means you can dictate what happens with someone else's body is what's fucked up.
Abortion at 6 months is something you aren't going to get a lot of agreement about. That shit was almost to the point it could of been born extremely premature. I think 28-30 weeks is the earliest babies have a decent shot at living.
You're just arguing with someone saying something that is definitely massively unpopular is. Personally, I don't give a fuck and think it's fine. If we went back to throwing deformed or unwanted babies into the local lake/off a cliff, also fine with me. I don't generally get mad at the fact that people wouldn't approve of that.
Technology is improving the premie survival rate all the time. If we can pull an embryo and bring it to term after a week, should abortion be restricted similarly?
Some other criteria is necessary.
I think in the last like 15 years we have gone from 22 weeks to like, 21 weeks and 3 days as the record.
A week is silly. Most women don't even know they are pregnant until they miss their period. Give that a week to be sure they missed it at that's already technically 5 weeks along.
If technology gets as good as you suggest, then we will have to reconsider everything. Governments would have to be willing to take all of them as wards of the state. Before that, we would have to make sure it was just as safe as an abortion. After that, we would have to consider if this mother has a right to not allow this lump or cells to not grow into a full grown human who has to grow up as a ward of the state.
Very complicated ethical mess. But I don't think technology will be there for 50+ years. I'm not sure America will even be here that long these days.
Sorry, yeah, I realize I was proposing a reductio ad absurdum as a thought experiment. And yes, I do think that eventually they will get to that point, but my real point was that "time since conception" is not a great metric for a legal line to draw, it's merely a convenient one.
I think personally, as a cis white dude with no stake in the matter, if we had to draw a line for terminations without a specific reason, we should put it somewhere around 6 months with medical exceptions. Developmental problems often don't show up until fairly late, and I think that things like Down syndrome, major uncorrectable development abnormalities or genetic diseases or other quality-of-life issues are perfectly valid reasons for a pregnancy termination. But that's a huge mire to get sunk into and each additional rule would require debates.
All of these questions apply at 6 months or whatever arbitrary date you set. Birth is a more dangerous and damaging procedure than abortion. If forcing the test tube baby extraction could be disallowed for danger, why isn't forced birth?
Says who, you?
What does it matter if others don't agree, that doesn't change the argument.
The siren call of the "reasonable moderate" always substituting status quo opinion polling in place of moral arguments.
"Listen, most people don't support gay marriage, so you shouldn't say gay marriage should be legal."
What if the unborn is a girl? At 6 months, they deserve a say in their bodily autonomy. Why are you such a raging ageaphobe?
Take a look at that phrase. A fetus isn't capable of bodily autonomy because they require their mother's body in order to stand a chance of eventually existing (with bodily autonomy) in the world outside of it.
Which is precisely the fucking point.