cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
It wasn’t outside of her body, so I don’t see how that’s relevant.
What makes it relevant for me at least:
This isn’t a situation where the fetus/baby would have died on the table after labor without medical intervention, or an argument of “given longer time in the pregnant lady it would have been a healthy baby”. This woman could have went through the same exact experience of labor, when she went through labor, and pushed out a baby to put into the system for adoption.
At the moment she took medicine to kill it, if labor had been induced instead she would have given birth to a viable baby. There’s evidence of conciousness of the fetus two months before that point. The fetus would have been healthier if cooked longer, but it was “fully cooked” so to speak.
At that point I personally have a hard time writing the fetus off as simply part of the pregnant woman’s body.
It shows signs of conciousness and could survive separately from the pregnant woman if removed from her without other intervention (the meds that killed it). We don’t have any other “body parts” that work that way. To me, those differences require different considerations from say tumor removal.
The only thing that prevented this from being a baby capable of being given to the adoption system is that the woman carrying it chose to take medicine to kill it.
Arguments about whether it would be better not to exist than be in the system are separate from this for me.