The baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck[?]. Stillbirth is not a crime. Sure, there is evidence she was considering an abortion, but I see no evidence mentioned that she followed through on the purchase. Given that the facts are consistent with a naturally failed birth, which occur quite frequently, claims of infanticide are unwarranted.
This is a major fear of "pro life" legislation: women are reduced to birthing vessels and failure to reproduce warrants intense legal scrutiny. I have friends that could, in today's legal environment, be facing life in prison because they've had three or more miscarriages.
[?] I may have misread something, and cannot find a source on this on second reading. Leaving it in place for the sake of transparency.
> but I see no evidence mentioned that she followed through on the purchase
This article is about abortion rights. I think it's fair game to call a 35 week abortion what it is.
> women are reduced to birthing vessels
There isn't some conspiracy to turn women into birthing vessels. The only thing under debate is at what age a baby becomes a legal person afforded rights to life and at what age a women loses her right to end that life.
In many states the more accurate debate is at what point does the possibility of a not-yet guaranteed air-breathing human have more rights than the already living human it's still developing in. Or put another way, at what point do we decide that the woman's life belongs to the state?
These new laws make it clear that a pregnant female, who is already a participating member of humanity, has only one purpose. To carry out the pregnancy, even if it is high risk and likely to kill or disable her. If she fails to produce a new living member, she may now go to jail in some states because the quiet-bad-faith part is made into law; that her Life, is not nearly as important to them as possibility of the not-yet guaranteed new young human. There is nothing pro-life about that.
Oh please. Cool it with the strawman arguments. It's boring.
They aren't owned by the state. They simply can't kill the human growing inside them. That's it, that's all it is.
We don't need to drop to analogies and hyperbole, we have the language to describe what is happening. A woman, in most instances, chooses to have a baby grow inside of them. But regardless of how it got there, at a certain point that baby deserves human rights.
That point is all that's up for debate. At what point does a baby become a human with rights to life.
One side argues birth, one side argues conception. The vast majority decided viability 22 weeks (disturbing imo but neither here nor there).
My human right to free speech stops at the point it harms someone else.
I don't see why these rights would be any bloody different.
If you want to debate this issue you need to be willing to define when a baby becomes a human, because THAT is the only thing being debated here.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
In particular, please edit out flamewar swipes like your first sentence here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Can you link to one? I can find articles calling it a still birth, which is obviously the contention of those who think she's innocent, but I can't find any articles talking about the cord being wrapped. Also, the initial medical examination of the body said it died of asphyxiation, determined by a "float test" which evidently showed air in the lungs. It seems this conclusion may likely have been erroneous and the float test not scientifically sound, but it seems a bit unlikely they would initially conclude such a thing if the cord were obviously wrapped around the neck.
> The baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. Stillbirth
Do you have another source which is saying that? This article says:
> Paramedics arrived at Latice Fisher’s Mississippi home to find a baby in the toilet, lifeless and blue, the umbilical cord still attached. The child — roughly six pounds and more than 35 weeks along — was rushed to the hospital, where it was pronounced dead.
> Fisher, a mother of three, told paramedics she had not known she was pregnant. But she later admitted to a nurse that she had known about the pregnancy. And after she voluntarily surrendered her iPhone to police, investigators discovered that Fisher, a former police dispatcher, had searched for how to “buy Misopristol Abortion Pill Online” 10 days earlier.
It may have been a case of the woman earnestly not knowing she was pregnant for months (don't laugh, this happens with very obese women) and thinking she had just recently gotten pregnant. But it doesn't say anything about a nuchal chord.
Babies are born prematurely at 35 weeks and earlier. My mother survived being born at 33 weeks. There is no doubt we're talking about a human individual at this point.
I sincerely hope that American abortion activists and supporters will reconsider the ethics of late-term abortion. It's barbaric. I think most people just haven't done the research / internalized the cruelty.
'Serious' is a subjective qualifier that is doing a lot of work in your comment. But yes, I have met quite a few people who believe abortion should be flat legal, no qualifications or conditions. A lot of rhetoric about fetuses being parasites. From a few I've even heard "In my religion, it's not a person until it breaths."
"In 2015, almost two thirds (65.4%) of abortions were performed at ≤8 weeks’ gestation, and nearly all (91.1%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation. Few abortions were performed between 14 and 20 weeks’ gestation (7.6%) or at ≥21 weeks’ gestation (1.3%). During 2006–2015 the percentage of all abortions performed at >13 weeks’ gestation remained consistently low (≤9.0%). Among abortions performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation, a shift occurred toward earlier gestational ages, with the percentage performed at ≤6 weeks’ gestation increasing 11%."
That's ~91% of abortions at less than/equal to 13 weeks.
What's more:
"[T]he abortion rate for 2015 was 11.8 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 188 abortions per 1,000 live births."
There were 638,169 total abortions, with only 9% (~57,500) occurring after 13 weeks.
Consider that this includes fetuses with deadly/debilitating defects (including, but not limited to, Down's Syndrome, cystic fibrosis and spina bifida) as well as other issues that threaten the life of the mother, doom the fetus to a painful death after birth and/or condemn such a child to a lifetime of misery.
Many/most of those cannot be determined without an amniocentesis[1], which isn't performed until 14-20 weeks.
It's not clear how many >13 week abortions are performed in those cases, but it's likely that a significant portion are fetuses that will likely die before/soon after birth, have debilitating defects and/or threaten the life of the mother.
As such, the truth is that the vast majority of abortions are performed long before a fetus is much more than the length of your middle finger.
So no. "Late-term" abortions are extremely rare, with only ~1.3% (~9,000 out of ~4.6 million pregnancies) performed after 21 weeks. And likely many (most?) are fetuses that have been found to have serious defects/abnormalities and/or a full term pregnancy threatens the life/health of the mother.
I'm not sure what you think "abortion activists" are advocating.
I'd say they're advocating giving women the opportunity to save their own lives and/or prevent enormous suffering among babies with debilitating/life-threatening conditions.
> I'd say they're advocating giving women the opportunity to save their own lives and/or prevent enormous suffering among babies with debilitating/life-threatening conditions.
Overturning Roe v Wade doesn't change anything related to these types of abortions. It only allows states to make up their own laws. Most of which won't change from what it is now and most of which only ban elective abortion.
