quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter Well, "stillborn" means dead at birth, so it would never have been a living child if we define "child" to require having been born. It's hard to say whether or not she would have done herself more harm by refusing the operation - although apparently she was downright horrified by the prospect of a C-section (for whatever reason), so there is a possibility of psychological side-effects. All that aside, what you say does make a lot of sense - although I think such a law would have to be framed and placed into action in concrete terms before anyone could be charged under it. The statute this woman is being charged under is too broad, in my opinion, and I don't think murder is the right charge - some form of manslaughter or child neglect seems to be what would be called for. Ultimately, what I'd like to see is a requirement that, at some stage of pregnancy, a woman has to make the choice to either abort or sign a contract which specifically outlines her rights and responsibilities should she choose to continue with the pregnancy. It concerns me when women in the late stages of pregnancy are suddenly making radical decisions to do one thing or another based purely on emotion, and then after the fact people start asking questions about whether it was acceptable or not. If we're going to consider these obligations to be the law, they need to be laid out in no uncertain terms.

I agree completely. Murder is probably not the right category defined on those terms, although manslaughter might be, and I believe it has indeed been used for similar cases in the past.

And I guess your final point is what I'm talking about - people need to be prepared to accept the consequences of her actions, a pregnant woman can't decide to do an "abortion" 5 minutes before birth. We may not call it a living child if it hasn't been born yet, but it certainly was developed enough to suffer a hell of a lot during the miscarriage. I think you'd have a hard time making a pregnant woman sign a contract, but a little bit of legislation on this issue wouldn't hurt (fuck all of you who claim it's infringing on our "freedom" - nobody deserves the freedom to be a depraved parasite of society).

Of course, sounds like this woman had some psychological problems and would probably get off with a defense of insanity and then be committed to a mental asylum. Which is exactly where this woman should be. That and also on one of these TV makeover shows.

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