The Utah state legislature is currently debating a bill that would make getting an illegal abortion or having certain kinds of miscarriages an act of criminal homicide committed by the woman. The bill does not say anything about penalties for the person providing the illegal abortion. The only penalty I could find (with about 5 minutes of googling) is that an MD who provides an illegal abortion can lose their license.
In certain circumstances it would become aggravated murder:
- it occurs while the woman is in jail (note that incarcerated women can't get legal abortions in Utah)
- the woman is pregnant with twins
- an instance where the woman has previously been convicted of rape, murder, kidnapping, or criminal homicide
In Utah the maximum sentence for criminal homicide is life in prison and the maximum sentence for aggravated murder is the death penalty.
The bill starts off by saying that the death of any fetus is an act of criminal homicide and then goes and defines a bunch of exceptions that would include *most* miscarriages and *most* legal abortions.
Specifically here are the exceptions for miscarriages:
(3) A person is not guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child if the sole reason
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for the death of the unborn child is that the person:
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(a) refused to consent to:
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(i) medical treatment; or
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(ii) a cesarean section; or
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(b) failed to follow medical advice.
74--(4) A woman is not guilty of criminal homicide of her own unborn child if the death of
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her unborn child:
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(a) is caused by a criminally negligent act of the woman; and
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(b) is not caused by an intentional, knowing, or reckless act of the woman.
And here are the exceptions for legal abortions:
(1) As used in this section, "viable" means that the unborn child has reached a stage of
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fetal development when the unborn child is potentially able to live outside the womb, as
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determined by the attending physician to a reasonable degree of medical certainty.
277--(2) An abortion may be performed in this state only by a physician
281--(3) An abortion may be performed in this state only under the following
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circumstances:
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(a) the unborn child is not viable; or
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(b) the unborn child is viable, if:
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(i) the abortion is necessary to avert:
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(A) the death of the woman on whom the abortion is performed; or
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(B) a serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily
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function of the woman on whom the abortion is performed;
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(ii) two physicians who practice maternal fetal medicine concur, in writing, in the
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patient's medical record that the fetus has a defect that is uniformly diagnosable
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and uniformly lethal; or
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(iii)(A) the woman is pregnant as a result of:
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(I) rape, as described in Section 76-5-402 ;
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(II) rape of a child, as described in Section 76-5-402.1 ; or
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(III) incest, as described in Subsection 76-5-406 (10) or Section 76-7-102 ; and
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(B) before the abortion is performed, the physician who performs the abortion:
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(I) verifies that the incident described in Subsection (3)(b)(iii)(A) has been
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reported to law enforcement; and
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(II) complies with the requirements of Section 62A-4a-403 .
As much as I do enjoy a good debate on the legality and morality of abortion, that isn't my purpose in making this thread. I am interested in discussing why someone would ever want to start with a baseline of "having a miscarriage is illegal" and then make exceptions. Isn't this the sort of thing that people like to claim would never happen in America when bring up the extreme examples of anti-abortions laws around the world?
This bill specifically revokes previous laws that prevent the prosecution of a woman for inducing an abortion/miscarriage herself.
This bill explicitly states that mid-levels practitioners cannot provide abortions. I don't know if this is a change or not but it seems like an odd place to make such a declaration.
My reading of the miscarriage section is that miscarriages caused by an intentional, knowing or reckless act of the woman are criminal homicide
unless that action constitutes criminal negligence and as long as her doctor didn't advise against that specific action. o_O WTF? Am I missing something here?
I think they are trying to make a woman inducing a miscarriage/abortion herself without the aid of a physician illegal. But they go about this in a convoluted way that looks to me like it leaves the door wide open for punishing a variety of other acts.
This bill doesn't make medical exceptions for a woman's actions. Could a woman be thrown in jail for taking a medication that has a known risk of miscarriage? It would be a knowing and intentional act that doesn't constitute criminal negligence. In many cases it would be following her doctor's advice and not going against it so she wouldn't get that exception either.
Also, as a side note, the bill uses the word person everywhere except in the section detailing legal abortions. There they use woman every single time.
And here is a link to the bill's entire text:
http://le.utah.gov/~2010/htmdoc/hbillhtm/HB0012.htm
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Johannen man, take a pill and calm down. Seriously, I'm worried about you man. Take up gardening or something, put that rake to leaves rather then skulls!
This is, however, shockingly mad. I don't understand it - how does bizarre legislation like this even come into play? Do people just get bored?
"How do we attempt to ban abortion as much as possible without the Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional?"
Mormons. I think that is a net gain.
I don't really understand why people seem to think it's easier to prosecute women than it is to just give free, useful prenatal care. I mean, are they under the impression many women willfully miscarry?
It would become a barren wasteland barely capable of supporting human life....
OH WAIT
Here is the text of the bill:
I just can't believe some of the crap that's going on in courts and in the creation of new laws these days. I am almost at the point now where I think I may actually be the weird one! I mean, should I change? Should I start thinking this stuff is o.k and start supporting the fact that I shouldn't be allowed to take photos of my own children or I am a pedophile? Should I think that abortion is murder and you should go to jail for it? Should I just give up all my beliefs and let the law and the country do my thinking for me.
Jingoism here I come, it's becoming so tiring thinking for myself and trying for a better world.
So let's just hit SLC.
between this and the mormons utah is going to turn into some kind of independent theocratic state
That would just make things worse.
(As if to say nuclear weapons don't make things worse, which obviously they do, but the destruction of SLC by itself would make things worse.)
Too many Mormons would survive if we just hit the city. How about we compromise and use some sort of poison in the drinking water or large scale deployment of poisonus gas? The scenery would survive that.
Construing a miscarriage as a potential crime is really the logical end point of any system of thought where a fertilized egg is considered a fully human person. That's really what "life begins at conception" means (and keep in mind, though we consider this to be kind of the default pro-life position now, it is really quite a radical stance). Politically speaking, however, legislation of this sort is usually meant to either create barriers to access, act as a sort of pro-life political theater, set a staging ground for future legislation, or some combination of all three.
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Better keep them women barefoot and uneducated.
That's all I have to say about human indecency.
I am sure that's how geology works.
Actually, the logical terminus is considering menstruation murder. After all, that egg could have been a child and you just flushed it down like so much goldfish.
Pretty much. They had their fingers (and wallets) deep in the fail-pie that was Prop. 8 over here in California. I think there was investigation into their donations to the Pro-8 campaign, but I don't know what, if anything, came of it.
But this stuff here is pure silly goosery.
"That's what I hate about this child-worship syndrome going on. "Save the children! They're killing children! How many children were at Waco? They're killing children!" What does that mean? They reach a certain age and they're off your fucking love-list? Fuck your children, if that's the way you think then fuck you too. You either love all people of all ages or you shut the fuck up."
Well, I suppose that argument could be made too, but there's a much finer line between genetically incomplete haploid cells and genetically complete diploid cells. Anthropologically, though, you do encounter societies that have strong taboos concerning menstruation and the implied neglect of a woman's "social obligations" that this implies, but in this particular case, I did specify a "system of though where a fertilized egg is considered a fully human person".
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At the same time a lot of fertilized eggs are lost during menstruation. There are estimates that only about half of all fertilized eggs every implant in the uterus and another 1/3 to 1/2 of all implanted eggs are spontaneously aborted in the first two weeks and this is commonly considered by women to be menstruation. So up to 3/4 of all fertilized eggs are actually lost during menstruation.
Is the Utah legislature even remotely likely to pass this bill, or is this yet another "I'll propose this to show how much I care, because I know it'll never pass and I'll never has to suffer any fallout" political dickwaving?
I think it has already been passed by both the house and the senate, gone through reconciliation and was sent to the governor yesterday.
How has this not been news before now?
http://le.utah.gov/~2010/status/hbillsta/hb0012.htm
Ah, I'm sorry if I misunderstood, as I thought that circumstance would count as a "miscarriage" and we were talking about menstruation within the context of unfertilized eggs only, though of course I was aware that the majority pregnancies end this way (my partner is in school studying diagnostic cytology, and a huge amount of it deals with gynecological cytology and examining such specimens for evidence of cancer). But returning to my original point, this underlines exactly what I was saying about the radical nature of the stance that life begins at conception. That idea only began to develop alongside a modern understanding of human reproduction. Previously opinions differed; for instance, the traditional Catholic position was that life begins at the quickening, when the mother can feel the fetus moving, and this was also the standard adopted by British common law.
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And the governor is almost guaranteed to sign it. See, once upon a time a good man ran for governor. And to get a few more votes from the right-wing/conservative set he picked someone who was much more conservative that him as his lieutenant governor. All was (more or less) well for a while, until the gov was tapped to be the US ambassador to China. And now we're stuck with this ass-hat governor that will do whatever 'the church' want him too.
I hate this fucking state sometimes.
The medical definition of pregnancy is that it starts at implantation. So the half of the fertilized eggs that never implant count as true menstruation and not spontaneous abortion. However, women very frequently mistake the extremely early spontaneous abortions as menstruation so if one were trying to write a law about them I could see the law targeting menstruation and meaning to get the very early spontaneous abortions as well.
There was a case where a woman was giving birth to twins, the doctor suggested that she have a c-section and she refused. As a result one of the twins died. This language is in there so in cases like this one the woman can't be charged.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13547012
Well, aside from the part where women can go to prison for having miscarriages. That part is somewhat less awesome.
I'm not entirely sure. I'm more receptive to the argument that a particular locality concentrating their particular ideology and doing so through concentrating political power in the hands of a particular group, will, I agree lead to casting the 'sane' people out. But I see the result of this as causing more radical policies to take hold as there will be less and less people who disagree with the government of said locality due to the exodus of said people.
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Oh, those crazy liberals and their Progressivism.
Realistically though, what are the chances of a woman actually getting convicted on this? I mean, clearly if a state is crazy enough to make a law like this I wouldn't put it past them to apply it, but I would imagine with all the people involved in the long chain to getting someone to prison at least one link would realize it will attract unwanted attention to the system.