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.
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.