Police in the United Kingdom are using data from period tracking apps and mass spectrometry tests conducted on blood, placenta, and urine to investigate patients who have had “unexplained” miscarriages.
Though abortion is legal in the UK, there are TRAP laws in place requiring certain conditions to be met first, paramount of which is that two separate doctors need to agree that the patient meets the criteria of the 1967 Abortion Act before any treatment can go ahead. Self-managed abortion is a criminal offense with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment in the UK, as is any abortion performed after the pregnancy has progressed passed 23 weeks and six days, unless the patient is at risk of serious physical harm or death, or the fetus has severe developmental anomalies.
Amazing how many governments are interested in making sure babies happen - to the point of sounding alarms.
What do they know that they’re not telling? Is the pollution so bad that we’ve wiped ourselves out biologically?
The birth rate is dropping almost everywhere and that’s bad for capitalism
All nations that receive the benefits of the industrial revolution, followed by increased education, medicine, resources, and stability seem to trend to a demographic transition. The net result is a stable, and usually falling, population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
They talk about this as if it’s mysterious. Not actually the fact that the working world is still based on one parent works and the other stays at home (offering their life in sacrifice to the system and providing the next generation for free, but I digress) but both parents HAVE to work to survive because the cost of living is through the roof. Child care costs too much, almost entirely wiping out one parents wage. And they could choose to offer incentives or address the reasons for the low birth rate, they know the reasons. But no, fear, criminalisation, those work better, as tools, to keep the chattel in line.
They know that democracy has always just been an illusion to keep us in line and that we are actually just chattel slaves for the ruling class. The system they built requires a stable or growing population when in fact it’s declining, so they’re taking the easy way out to boost numbers.
In the future, they’ll just grow us in vats so if we get out if line, they will just murder us all and grow a new batch of slaves. Progress! 😃
Aging populations are feared.
They allowed a human grade extinction event and now they’re got second thoughts? How… big brained monkey that sounds.
Self abortion can kill you. British law is made to protect you from yourself. Go to the doctor and everything will be fine. And free. And without you bleeding to death in your flat.
So… the punishment for doing something dangerous is life in prison? Someone who is administering an abortion themselves is desperate and probably not aware of services available to them. They’re the most vulnerable in society; someone your government should be helping and protecting.
Further, this opens every single women who has had a miscarriage up to scrutiny. I don’t know if anyone has been jailed for miscarrying in the UK, but it happens in the US through similar laws, and it is tragic and barbaric.
From the article:
Here’s a particularly egregious example (This woman attempted to commit suicide by rat poison and survived, her baby did not).
While I agree you probably shouldn’t use drugs while pregnant, obviously this won’t stop someone with an addiction. It just causes further harm to marginalized people to criminalize this stuff. These laws are used to hurt the poor and the addicted, and social services are better spent preventing these sort of things instead of punitive action.
Life is nuts, over here in Germany the maximum for the woman is one year or fine. I don’t think there’s actually been a case like that and if there was judges would find every mitigating circumstance they possibly could. I mean German courts regularly acquit women who kill their child within the first days of its life by ruling temporary insanity, they’re not known to not be understanding when people face exceptional circumstances they had no way to prepare themselves for.
It’s gotta be on the books though as the availability of punishment-free at-will abortions hinges on the managed procedure in the first place, the state’s constitutional duty to protect life requires it to minimise the number of abortions and welfare and said procedure (counselling where you’ll be told about all those welfare programs, three days cooldown) as well as absolutely zero demand for or providers of back-alley abortions is the way it’s done (providers, btw, face up to three years, six months to five years if against the will of the woman or putting her in danger)
It’s kinda "but I would have gotten the building permit anyway, I’m legally entitled to get one!’ – “but you still got to apply for it” territory. Life, as said, is a nuts punishment for that kind of thing.
On the flipside authorities still might want to investigate miscarriages simply to make sure that noone else slipped the woman something.
The state would find it’s money better spent through education and access to contraception, and opportunities for women.
I will also point out that fetuses are not people, so you are not protecting life by minimizing abortions by restricting abortions directly. If you are unsure of whether you feel if a fetus is a person or not, consider a hypothetical example: Consider a woman who has been told that they would be unable to carry a child to term. She conceives anyway, hoping the doctor is wrong. She endures multiple miscarriages against the advice of her doctor. Is she also a murderer?
These laws are written by people who cannot even imagine the lives that these women live. A cooldown period means multiple trips to the doctor. It means taking at least 2 days off work. It means finding child care and transportation for not just one day, but two. It also means obtaining the procedure is harder to hide, if she’s in a situation where she needs to do that. It’s incredibly burdensome and paternalistic.
I am not going to make any judgement of your character or insult you in any way. However, I do need to say this: comparing a woman’s control over her own body to needing to obtain a building permit is DEEPLY REPULSIVE.
Does Germany also criminalize self harm (cutting)? Overeating? Recklessly engaging in sports without protective equipment? Should we not also give out fines and force people in front of judges for these activities?
No threat of law will stop back-alley abortions. These women are already knowingly risking their lives when they do this outside of the medical system. They would risk death. That is what it means to them.
All those, and more, are being done.
The right to life starts at nidation as that’s when nature choses to attempt to bring a particular life to fruit, go argue with the constitutional court (you can safely skip everything from after the guiding principles to section C, that’s the main reasoning the rest is context). Human dignity extends even further, protecting e.g. against bullshit pre-implementation diagnostics.
“X is not a person” is a rather weak argument in general. As that’s the US reasoning I’ll point you towards various adult people that the US has, in the past, not considered persons. That kind of reasoning is absolutely incompatible with the German constitution and the time frames Roe vs. Wade use to decide whether someone is a person or not are absolutely arbitrary: A foetus develops as, not to, a human.
Completely bullshit argument. Consider that she’s lost in a desert with her kid without water, she carries it back to safety but it doesn’t survive the trip. Is she a murderer?
You can’t get counselling at the same place you get the abortion, conflict of interest. Also why would you take days off, counselling doesn’t take longer than shopping (make an appointment!), don’t you have weekends also why would taking a day off be an issue.
None of those involve another person.
Indeed, threat of punishment can’t do that. That’s why there’s a flurry of social programmes and decriminalised abortions available. Believe it or not but back-alley abortions aren’t a thing there, and neither is forbidding women to use highways to get to an appointment.
Generally speaking the whole thing is 99.99% uncontroversial in Germany. There’s occasionally talk about details, e.g. Bavaria not getting its shit together when it comes to making sure that enough gynecologists provide abortions, but nothing that rocks the core foundations of the whole thing.
Christ, this makes me sick.
There’s no point looking at the US for examples. UK is a different country and works differently. You are reminding me of some pro guns Americans, who say that since guns are banned in the UK (they are not, they are controlled) we have stabbings all day long, while in reality there are more stabbings per capita in the US. Or another common example of Americans thinking that self defence is illegal here and if you kill a burglar you’ll go to jail. While in reality there will be a proper hearing in the court and you’ll walk free because you were using reasonable force to protect yourself and your family.
A lot of systems are crumbling in the UK due to Tory mismanagement, but the courts are still working as intended and do protect people, sometimes even from themselves.
That doesn’t really seem to relate to the story at hand.
Women’s reproductive rights are a complex issue. On the one hand there’s killing babies; on the other there’s giving women a choice.
Tough call.
E: some of the PMs I’m getting for repeating this are absolute gold.
E2: we’re all going to hell
I personally prefer killing babies, it is more eco friendly.
I love how my joke went down as well as a foetus down the toilet
Fetuses are not babies.
Yeah, it’s a very old joke so doesn’t really make sense.
Much like women’s rights.
The 20th century called, it wants its jokes back.
Talk to the hand!
(Ok I’ll stop now I promise)
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“Killing babies”… how ignorant that sounds.
Maybe you should tell that to the comedian who wrote the joke 30 years ago
Oh. Okay. Sure. Good head’s up.