Comments on: Jailtime for “Murder” Moms?

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:10:46 +0000

No. There should be penalties for everyone involved because they all have a hand in murdering an innocent baby, therefore they all deserve to be held accountable. After all, if there is a bank robbery, everyone gets charged- no matter if you were in the bank, driving the car, or helping with the planning.

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:10:50 +0000

Brian,

is your notion that abortion restrictions won’t work unless there are penalties for everyone involved? Is that why you think the penalties should apply to everyone?

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:10:17 +0000

And if you criminalize abortion, most doctors would not dare put their medical license at risk, let alone the legal ramifications beyond that.

By: Kathryn Lynard Soper

Kathryn Lynard Soper — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:09:12 +0000

I support penalties for doctors and women and anybody else involved for late-term abortion. There’s absolutely no excuse for this.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:07:32 +0000

Sorry, Adam. If I had a direct response to the thread, it would be YES- most definitely.

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:59:27 +0000

I know people want to talk about abortion in general, so I’ve created a thread for that kind of talk. Further discussion of whether abortion restrictions are appropriate at all, and ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage discussion, should take place there.

http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4001

Alternatively, you can email me at adam at times and seasons dot org if there’s a topic you’d like to see discussed, and maybe that will happen some time in the future.

So lets restrict our talk in this thread to the following: for abortion restrictions THAT YOU SUPPORT, do you think the penalties for violating them should apply equally to women and doctors, and why? Do the reasons that others have advanced for treating women equal to doctors (or not) make sense?

I will construe posting off-topic comments as permission to move them to the other thread. Thanks for your cooperation.

By: Kathryn Lynard Soper

Kathryn Lynard Soper — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:18:52 +0000

Kaimi (47), thanks for that info. I will read it with great interest. Note, however, that ectopic pregnancies, which I was specifically referring to, happen early in pregnancy, and wouldn’t require a D&E –or even a D&C, for that matter–rather, an injection to allow the body to reabsorb the embryonic material, or a laproscopic procedure.

annegb:

I would always recommend against abortion, but no woman is going to take flack from me on this issue. Sheâ€™ll suffer enough anyway.

Amen, and amen.

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:20:33 +0000

Brian, et al.,
beware the threadjack. I’m going to start removing comments after this.

AHLDuke,

I do not think they should be of the same magnitude as for abortionists, simply because most mothers do not obtain abortions with the frequency that doctors perform them.

That is an extremely interesting argument that I’ve never seen elsewhere. I think I’m persuaded by it. If we have evidence that Dr. X performed an illegal abortion in Case Y with woman Z, the odds that Dr. X has performed other illegal abortions that he didn’t get caught for are higher than that woman Z has done so. This won’t always be true, but it seems like it would be true enough of the time to justify making the penalties stiffer for abortion docs.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:31:03 +0000

In response to yuor post, AHLDuke, if you get into “agency” being taken away, why not make murder legal, too?- because it being illegal takes one’s “agency” away.
If a baby is a baby at 8 months old, is it not a baby at 8 days old? When do you think the spirit enters the child?
And as far as making “certain circumstance abortion” permissable, the medical profession will be abuse that exception to no end for those who want to have an abortion.
And I know it has not been mentioned here, but some people want this to go back to the states, and become a state matter. That worked so very well for slavery and civil rights, did it not?
I do agree that those who are guilty of conspiracy should be punished for such.

By: AHLDuke

AHLDuke — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 03:57:06 +0000

As to abortion generally, I am of a Clintonite persuasion- it should be “safe, legal, and rare.” We should treat drugs the same way- a demand-side solution. I think that demand-side solutions are a more Zionlike solution- rather than eliminating the possibility of evil, and therefore making agency meaningless, we should do away with the desire to do evil. I do however oppose partial-birth or late-term abortion because I think it bears a serious resemblence to infanticide in a way that aborting a early-term fetus or simply taking the morning-after pill does not.

However, as I would support criminal sanctions on partial-birth abortions, I would support some form of criminal actions against the mothers who obtain one. I do not think they should be of the same magnitude as for abortionists, simply because most mothers do not obtain abortions with the frequency that doctors perform them. I do not agree with the argument that aborting mothers do not profit from abortion. Clearly they do, even if only in a non-economic way (i.e. having more time without having to care for a child). But women’s earning power is significantly enhanced by not having children (or additional children) at home that need care or even just material sustenance. How then can she not profit from having an abortion? But judgment in these cases should be done on an ad hoc basis- there will be cases where the mothers are the primary “seekers” of the abortion. In other cases, the doctors will be the one who encourages an uncertain woman to have an unnecessary abortion. And in a third set of circumstances, the genetic father, husband, or boyfriend may be the cheerleader in the matter-he too should be punished.