Back in December of 2009 a commenter at The Other McCain said:
The Indentured Servant Girl said…
M. Simon: women were not, and would not be charged with murder for procuring an abortion. It is the doctors that the law goes after.
Of course I had a response in my post Abortion Is Murder. My central question was this:
The question for me is enforcement. How intrusive will the government have to get to make it work? Weekly pregnancy tests? (the Drug War precedent) And of course with new technology coming on line – maybe electronic sniffers to look for changes in the body? Then every miscarriage becomes a murder investigation
I was pretty far out on a limb on that one. So far out that it was not taken seriously.
Well I ‘m not on a limb any longer. According to Bridget Casey we have a state legislator proposing just such a law.
For instance….Mr. Franklin wants all miscarriages to be investigated unless they occurred in the presence of a doctor. So in other words, if you miscarry at home, you could be investigated and you would have to prove that you did nothing to cause that miscarriage. If you took a sleeping pill or if you had a glass of wine then you would have to prove that neither of those things caused you to lose your baby…or you could be charged with murder.
I warned of this very thing in my November 2005 post It Is All About Enforcement.
And of course every miscarriage will need a murder investigation.
There is much more there about how an anti-abortion law will need to be enforced. None of it is good. Murder investigations are expensive and the number of them required if this law was a nationwide law would go from about 20,000 to on the order of 200,000. The effort on regular murder cases would decline or vast sums of money would be required to put this into effect.
Neil Boortz has some thoughts on this.
We are sure that Franklin believes women who suffer miscarriages should be put in a position where they might have to prove they did nothing to cause that miscarriage or face charges for murder and possible execution.
Now, you’re probably thinking that I’ve blown an exhaust valve here. Read it for yourself in Franklin’s House Bill 1 — introduced, by the way, with no co-sponsors.
The purpose of the bill is to take what Franklin calls “prenatal murder” and make it a crime punishable by death. By “prenatal murder,” Mr. Franklin means abortion.
What you may not immediately realize is that Mr. Franklin is also referring to miscarriages. See line 114 of my copy of Franklin’s bill: “Prenatal murder means the intentional removal of a fetus from a woman with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus.”
On line 118 you’ll read that a miscarriage might also be prosecuted as prenatal murder if it can be shown that the pregnant woman took some action that might have played a role in the miscarriage.
In other words, if Bobby Franklin’s bill were to become law (not gonna happen) a woman who suffers the anguish of a miscarriage could be put in the position of having to prove that she did nothing whatsoever to cause that miscarriage or face a murder charge.
One of the commenters at Hill Buzz
dginga Says:
February 24, 2011 at 5:07 pm
“I can’t imagine the pain and horror of having to deal with losing a child and then *prove my freaking innocence* if I had a miscarriage out of a doctor’s sight!”
MamaCon, my mother had to do that very thing back in the 1960?s before Roe V. Wade, and it made her a rabid pro-choice advocate forever after (and she’s 85 now). Even though she already had SEVEN children. Even though she was well over 40 at the time. Even though it was a high-risk pregnancy to begin with, when she miscarried at home and my dad took her to the emergency room, she said the docs and nurses treated her like a criminal assuming that she had given herself an abortion rather than making the very realistic (and true) assumption that she was too old for the fetus to be viable. After that experience she vowed to support the pro-choice advocates so that no woman would ever be treated like that again following a miscarriage.
The problem is a political one. As a commenter points out.
rikc Says:
February 24, 2011 at 10:08 pm
One jack-wagon and an order of fries to go! Geeze is this dude for real???? Someone please tell me this person is a plant from the Odumbo camp to make us Indies lean back towards the dems! There are a lot of us Indies who are moderate to liberal who voted GOP in the last election because the dems were simply out of control, not to mention Odumob’s antics, however if the GOP doesn’t squash this asshattery by lunatic fringe people like this guy, a lot of us will be forced to go back to the left. So again I pose the question, is this guy for real, or is he a plant from the Odumbo camp to gather up all the Indies who left the dems at the starting gate in the past two elections???
Lefty site Mother Jones has this to say:
Holding women criminally liable for a totally natural, common biological process is cruel and non-sensical. Even more ridiculous, the bill holds women responsible for protecting their fetuses from “the moment of conception,” despite the fact that pregnancy tests aren’t accurate until at least 3 weeks after conception. Unless Franklin (who is not a health professional) invents a revolutionary intrauterine conception alarm system, it’s unclear how exactly the state of Georgia would enforce that rule other than holding all possibly-pregnant women under lock and key.
I’ve seen a lot of anti-woman, hate-filled bills this year, but this one takes the cake. And it’s not just anti-woman, it’s anti-logic. The bill contends that Georgia is exempt from upholding Supreme Court decisions like Roe v. Wade because the Constitution’s Article I only governs five crimes: counterfeiting, piracy, high seas felonies, offenses against the law of nations, and treason. According to the bill, since murder is not one of those five crimes, it should be solely governed by the state. The bill also mandates that doctors must try to save the mother and the fetus, even though as we know, there are many situations in which both cannot be saved. It also changes medical terminology, re-designating all zygotes, embryos, and concepti as fetuses. In the bill’s logic, a fertilized egg is the same as a person, and its destruction is murder. Sometimes even a fertilized egg will fail to adhere to the uterine lining, so would that make a uterus a murderer?
I have written a few other posts on the abortion question.
Letter To A Friend
The Jewish Position On Abortion
The Jews And Partial Birth Abortion
I’m against abortion and I’m also against government involvement in the question. It is a political, medical, and legal minefield. Which is why I support Rockford Pro Life which is against abortion and against government involvement in the question.
Which reminds me of another question. Can anyone point me to a secular anti-abortion group? I have never heard of one.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
5 responses to “Miscarriages Will Need To Be Investigated”
It’s not exactly a secular anti-abortion group, but the Secular Right blog has sometimes discussed the subject.
http://secularright.org
You might find this group interestng…Libertarians for Life. Not entirely secular – some are, some aren’t.
Oh, and you just got that link from someone who’s pro-choice. So, I don’t agree with their arguments. At all. But I thought you might find them interesting. I did.
Kathy,
I’m pro choice politically. I’m anti-abortion personally. But in a more engineering sort of way. Let us find out the reasons women have abortions and see what we can do about them.
http://www.abortionno.org/Resources/fastfacts.html
From the above site:
All abortion numbers are derived from pro-abortion sources courtesy of The Alan Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood’s Family Planning Perspectives.
The #1 reasons are social or convenience.
Kathy,
I looked at the Libertarian site you linked to and I must say I like the religious Rockford Pro Life approach better. Government must stay out of the question.
Simon, this is a bunch of straw man arguments. They never investigated women as you suggest when abortion was illegal. Why would they start now? An occasional woman may run into some medical professionals who do not understand the issue, but it’s not common. But the idea that women will be forced to have weekly pregnancy tests, and every miscarriage would have to be investigated as a possible murder is just plain a straw man. NOBODY is suggesting anything of the kind. This is pure propaganda.
This bill you quote says that a person “who ENDS that life” (emphasis added) will, blah blah. A woman who has a miscarriage hasn’t ENDED anything. It’s a death from natural causes. Bridget Casey and Neil Boortz are dead wrong. This kind of argumentation just muddies the waters. The law says, “Prenatal murder means the intentional removal of a fetus from a woman with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus.” What part of INTENTIONAL don’t you understand? It means the person has mens rea: the intent to destroy a living human being. A woman who has a miscarriage doesn’t INTEND anything. So the law wouldn’t subject her to any penalty. And any competent medical person can tell the difference between a miscarriage and an induced abortion. So MamaCon had a bad experience. As they say, hard cases make bad law. Did they prosecute her? Of course not! Oh, and please note that NO prosecution can start unless there is first probable cause. A woman who presents with a miscarriage isn’t providing any probable cause.
Rockford Pro Life is an a-political organization. There are lots that offer services to women. They stay out of the politics of it. That doesn’t mean that the membership isn’t working to make abortion illegal. Libertarians for Life is strictly secular, and so is Feminists for Life.
Now let me ask you. If you want the government to stay out of abortion, what should happen if someone shoots an abortionist? Don’t you think that the government should stay out of that, too? If not, government isn’t neutral. And what if someone killed your teenage daughter? Should government do anything about that? What is the purpose of government rightfully constructed?
I like rational discussion. Your article ain’t. Please go back and develop a RATIONAL argument in support of your position. Leave the straw men out. Leave out IGNORANT medical personnel. As a person who is exceptionally knowledgeable about abortion, I can GUARANTEE you that NO induced abortion looks like a miscarriage.