Why shouldn't abortion have legal consequences?

[phil19034]

Hello Deacon,
Thank you for your post. I work at a law firm, but I’m not a lawyer… however, I’m interested in the way the law works.

Again: I’m coming at this for a purely legal stand point (trying to keep out emotions, Catholic/Christian beliefs, etc.)

Your point is a very interesting point which I had not considered, and perhaps others like Trent Horn may have not considered (though I can’t speak for him).

Question: what happens if a Doctor, believing that the mother might corporation with law enforcement decides to testify against the mother instead? This is an honest question, because I don’t know the answer.

Also, if unborn children are given rights under the Constitution (as Ted Cruz says) would that change what you stated above? Again, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m asking.

Thank you and God Bless

 

[phil19034]

Thank you Deacon,

I’ll admit this has been a question I have struggled with. I look forward to additional posts from you. This is obviously an area where faith, philosophy and law are all coming from different angles

 

[guanophore]

If what you are saying is true, then that is logically inconsistent and it makes the prolife movement look ridiculous. If I were to hire a hitman to kill someone I despise, then I could also be charged with first degree murder (even though I wasn’t the one actually carrying out the act). How is a woman a “victim” of abortion? She is a willing participant in first degree murder.

Some women do have the knowledge and intent, but most do not. Many women have bought into the lie that the pregnancy is “the by products of conception”. I have had young women coming up to me weeping after doing a presentation on abortion wanting to know why they were not TOLD that there was a baby or how the baby would be affected. They are not told because the baby has no rights, and therefore, informed consent only applies to the woman, who is the patient.

Many women, if they saw an ultrasound, would not get the abortion. This is why our efforts need to be on prevention and education, rather than incarceration.

 

[phil19034]

Thank you for you insight Deacon. You have given me some good arguments to ponder and pray over.

God Bless you

 

[guanophore]

BlueEyedLady has a good point: women are not weak, and today pro-abortion women are very devout in their belief. If abortion is murder (which it is), and if killing a unborn child is no different than killing a 2 month old (it’s no different), then a mother receiving an abortion should be treated the same way as a mother who hires a person to kill her 2 month old child.

Their guilt should be determined in a court of law. Women who were under duress and were temporarily insane will have an insanity plea, while women who are militantly pro abortion should go directly to jail, “not pass Go, and not collect $100.”

The reason I don’t think this will work is because a jail term would still seem preferable to many women who dread the next 18 years of life raising a child.

 

[phil19034]

The reason I don’t think this will work is because a jail term would still seem preferable to many women who dread the next 18 years of life raising a child.

you think they would choose jail over adoption?

 

[exnihilo]

We will not stop abortion by punishing women. We stop abortion by putting abortionists out of business. States had a variety of laws pre Roe, limiting abortion in different ways. The laws made performing the abortion illegal, not having an abortion. (Sometimes abortionists charged with the crime tried to haul their patents into court as accessories—to discourage prosecution. But that tactic failed.)

What if the woman is also the abortionist? It seems a bit unfair to say you bear no responsibility for having an abortion unless you perform it on yourself.

There is a lot of talk about murder on some of these threads. I don’t think I ever see abortion called murder on pro-life sites. It’s called abortion. It’s the killing of an unborn child. It can’t be murder now because it’s legal. It’s protected. It’s celebrated as a woman’s right.

It certainly isn’t a good talking point to call abortion murder in our society. But I think it most certainly is.

To take a lesser example: Many people favor punishing drug dealers but not drug users.

Demand comes before supply. If no one wants something there won’t be a supply. If people want something there will be a supply. Absent draconian punishment of users you won’t do much to get rid of drugs by locking up drug dealers.

 

[Peter_J]

If abortion is murder (which it is), and if killing a unborn child is no different than killing a 2 month old (it’s no different), then a mother receiving an abortion should be treated the same way as a mother who hires a person to kill her 2 month old child.

Their guilt should be determined in a court of law. Women who were under duress and were temporarily insane will have an insanity plea, while women who are militantly pro abortion should go directly to jail, “not pass Go, and not collect $100.”

This is truly something to ponder, and honestly this is another topic that Trump is bringing out into discussion.

Where will your country be located? And do you think you can get DJT to be its president?

 

[JimG]

What if the woman is also the abortionist? It seems a bit unfair to say you bear no responsibility for having an abortion unless you perform it on yourself.

Suicide is a grave sin as well. Some states may even have laws against it. But there is no legal punishment for it.

It certainly isn’t a good talking point to call abortion murder in our society. But I think it most certainly is.

Murder is a legal term and carries a whole range of degrees from involuntary manslaughter to capital murder. The legal penalties differ widely. And as we have seen in the case of the affluent teen who recently killed some people with reckless driving, sometimes the penalty is light. Abortion in any case is a separate crime from murder legally. In fact it is not currently a crime at all.

Demand comes before supply. If no one wants something there won’t be a supply. If people want something there will be a supply. Absent draconian punishment of users you won’t do much to get rid of drugs by locking up drug dealers.

Demand and supply are related not always in ironclad ways. There was no demand for I-phones before they were invented. There are only a limited amount of abortionists in any given state. Close up the abortionists, and you stop the majority of the abortion. You won’t stop every single one, but most. Not only that, but the law is a teacher. Currently it teaches the lesson that new human beings are disposable at will. Soon it may teach the lesson that the elderly and the disabled are disposable at will. I want the law to teach the right lesson, not to teach that human life is subject to the will and the whim of another.

The medical profession taught the wrong lesson when it eliminated the prohibition of abortion and suicide from the Hippocratic Oath. We are sinking into a true culture of death, aided and abetted by the political and cultural elites, the courts, and a great many of the people. And the more we talk about penalizing women, the less chance there is of ever eliminating abortion. That’s exactly why the pro-abortion side likes to bring up this question. It helps their cause.

 

[guanophore]

I’ll admit that part of me is bewildered at practicing Christians using the legal system as the metric for how we treat post-abortive women. Even if it were logical and consistent, is it Christian?

Pregnancy is unique, which makes abortion very different from other crimes. I am adamantly pro-life, but deliberating over how much we should get to punish a post-abortive woman doesn’t strike me as particularly in keeping with Christ’s teachings - and offers a heck of a lot of fuel to pro-abortion folks who insist that pro-lifers hate women.

I agree with you. We have two generations of people now contaminated with the error that the “byproducts of conception” are not a person.We have so much education to do, and I am sure it is not going to happen through the legal system.

We need to approach it more like the abolitionists did slavery - education, persuasion, and delivering people from bondage one at a time. After we get the railroad running that delivers women and children, we can better sway public opinion so that the law can be changed.

What sinners need is salvation and healing, not prison time.

 

[pensmama87]

I agree with you. We have two generations of people now contaminated with the error that the “byproducts of conception” are not a person.We have so much education to do, and I am sure it is not going to happen through the legal system.

We need to approach it more like the abolitionists did slavery - education, persuasion, and delivering people from bondage one at a time. After we get the railroad running that delivers women and children, we can better sway public opinion so that the law can be changed.

What sinners need is salvation and healing, not prison time.

Thank you.

I was formerly pro-choice, and that was largely out of a sense of misguided compassion for the mother. My mind was changed by my experience of pregnancy and by learning about embryonic and fetal development.

(In fact, just today I was talking with a mother whose baby spent time in the NICU and she told me how one nurse there told her there are many, many parents who were surprised that their babies were born as fully formed humans, just very small - they expected their babies to be born missing entire body parts. )

It does make sense to me that, as pregnancy is a unique biological/natural condition, it deserves a unique consideration under the law. That doesn’t make it OK to kill innocent children, but a pregnant woman is in a very different situation than other people entrusted with the care of children (including the father of her baby.)

 

[guanophore]

What if a woman uses Mifepristone (RU-486)? It would probably be easy for a woman to obtain, so would a woman who used this drug if abortion was outlawed still be immune from prosecution?

This got me thinking. I used to do some work with the rape crisis clinic. Teens that came in for medical treatment were always given a cup of pills to swallow. They were told they were antibiotics to prevent any diseases (and some of them were) but they were NEVER TOLD that one of the pills was the “morning after” abortifacient pill.

These girls were recently traumatized and not in a condition to have a discussion about what they wanted to do if they were pregnant, but to wait until they were able to have it would have made the pill useless (too late). So it was given to them without telling them.

 

[guanophore]

you think they would choose jail over adoption?

Perhaps not, but how can one be compelled, under duress of punishment, to relinquish one’s parental rights? I don’t see how it can legally be done.

 

[Peter_J]

There is a lot of talk about murder on some of these threads. I don’t think I ever see abortion called murder on pro-life sites.

If I might piggy-back on that …

In Catholic discussions, we’ll often criticism someone for being “More Catholic than the Catholic Church”. I wonder if we ought to apply a similar idea to those who are “More Pro-life than the Pro-life movement”.

 

[Peter_J]

While pro-life advocates yearn for the day when unborn children are protected under law and abortions are banned, the pro-life movement has historically opposed punishing women who have abortions — instead focusing on holding abortion practitioners criminally accountable for the unborn children they kill in abortions.

**But that hasn’t stopped pro-abortion candidate Hillary Clinton and abortion activists from manipulating Trump’s initial comments to misrepresent the whole pro-life movement as unfeeling women haters.
**

New Planned Parenthood Ad Attacks Donald Trump for “Punishing” Women Having Abortions

 

[Tablefor9]

New Planned Parenthood Ad Attacks Donald Trump for “Punishing” Women Having Abortions

But they do so much wonderful work.

 

[pragmatist91]

I still have yet to hear any solid rebuttals to the points I made. So far, I have only heard people dodging my counter-arguments and making excuses for women who get abortions. Is that how you deal with people who expose and question major inconsistencies in the group?

A bunch of you keep saying that pregnancy is a special circumstance. It is not. Most women dealing with an unplanned pregnancy are not raped. They CHOSE to have sex before they had the ability to support a child. That is a fact. They made one bad decision another, just like many people who are currently serving life sentences or on death row. Many people doing life sentences/death row had several risk factors:

-Single parent homes or the foster care system
-Didn’t have money for basic needs
-Experienced drug addiction
-Mental illness (either genetic or because the mother took drugs during pregnancy)
-Were victims of crime themselves
-Lack of positive role models
-Endured physical/emotional/sexual abuse as children
-Lack of social support

Even with these risk factors, a killer still isn’t getting off the hook in the US legal system. Why should a woman getting an abortion be treated any differently? Someone brought up the example of a teenage girl who got pregnant and was told by her parents to either get an abortion or go live somewhere else. Let’s compare that to a teenage boy whose single mother is a heroin addict and he murders a store clerk for money. That teenage boy would likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, despite the fact that he may have been left to fend for himself and didn’t know where to turn. Either they should both go to jail or they should both get off with a minor slap on the wrist and simply have people pray for them.

Also, for those of you who are against a legal punishment for abortion, what are you doing to do when RU-486 replaces most surgical abortions? Even if you closed down the abortion clinics and banned RU-486, you could still have a thriving black market for abortion-inducing chemicals and even your back alley abortionists. Some plants have been used to induce abortion since antiquity.

 

[guanophore]

I still have yet to hear any solid rebuttals to the points I made. So far, I have only heard people dodging my counter-arguments and making excuses for women who get abortions. .

Understanding the pressure and ignorance these women suffer is not “making excuses”. A life is still taken, and their own souls are wounded, some mortally.

Our puny legal system is not able to change the hearts and minds of those who live in darkness. Only love, only the Gospel can do that.

How will locking people up in punishment make them more available to the Gospel?

 

[pragmatist91]

Understanding the pressure and ignorance these women suffer is not “making excuses”. A life is still taken, and their own souls are wounded, some mortally.

Our puny legal system is not able to change the hearts and minds of those who live in darkness. Only love, only the Gospel can do that.

How will locking people up in punishment make them more available to the Gospel?

I agree that the prison system has major flaws. But are you open to reforming the prison system so that all killers don’t have to get locked up? The point that I’m trying to drive home is that abortion is premeditated murder and that’s how it should be prosecuted under the law. If you are willing to reform how society treats all first degree murder charges, then I’m with you. But if you are going to give women special treatment in the criminal justice system, then I’m 100% against your proposal.

 

[Peter_J]

I still have yet to hear any solid rebuttals to the points I made.

To be fair, you don’t know how many people have *read *“the points [you] made”. The prolife movement has quite a lot of work to do, and dealing with fringe elements shouldn’t be a very high priority IMO.