Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion

[tstorm823]

Reality is often crazier than imagination

The State of California prosecuting a meth addict is not "you had a miscarriage, sounds like murder to me". She used meth 3 days before giving birth, and ended up with a dead baby, which they found toxic concentrations of methamphetamine in. She overdosed her unborn child on meth while 8 and a half months pregnant. As an aside, the lawyers defending her used some particularly annoying arguments, including that there is no medical knowledge that meth would cause a stillbirth. No duh, nobody is doing clinical testing on the use of meth in pregnancy.

Nobody wants to prosecute natural or accidental death. The context here is that a large percentage of pregnancies end tragically in miscarriage through no discernable fault of the mother, and abortion advocates want to scare people into thinking those grieving mothers will be dragged to jail , and that's just not going to happen without reason to suspect a crime. If a bear shows up in someone's backyard and mauls their child, nobody would ever even think about criminal charges... unless a video surfaces of the parents throwing the kid out the back door to the bear, and then you bet there's gonna be criminal charges. When a child dies, we assume the parents didn't murder them unless there is reason to think they did. That same logic isn't going to magically not apply to the unborn.

 

[Absent]

By the way,

Worried that women will be prosecuted for using abortion pills? It’s already happening | Arwa Mahdawi

Privileged women will always be able to get safe terminations but for the rest prosecutions will have a chilling effect

www.theguardian.com

 

[Silvanus]

The State of California prosecuting a meth addict is not "you had a miscarriage, sounds like murder to me". She used meth 3 days before giving birth, and ended up with a dead baby, which they found toxic concentrations of methamphetamine in. She overdosed her unborn child on meth while 8 and a half months pregnant. As an aside, the lawyers defending her used some particularly annoying arguments, including that there is no medical knowledge that meth would cause a stillbirth. No duh, nobody is doing clinical testing on the use of meth in pregnancy.

Nobody wants to prosecute natural or accidental death.

Underlining mine, because prosecuting accidental death is exactly what did happen here.

Regardless of the meth use, there was clearly no intent to cause the death, no "implied malice". The outcome was not intentional: obviously accidental. Which makes a murder charge grossly inappropriate. Thankfully a higher Judge has recognised that and dismissed the charge.

As an aside, the lawyers defending her used some particularly annoying arguments, including that there is no medical knowledge that meth would cause a stillbirth. No duh, nobody is doing clinical testing on the use of meth in pregnancy.

?? Obviously clinical testing is not the only method of researching phenomena like this. We study the impacts of hard drug use all the time without needing to actively hit people up with hard drugs in a clinical test.

 

[tstorm823]

Regardless of the meth use, there was clearly no intent to cause the death, no "implied malice".

Malice and gross negligence are frequently legally equivalent.

 

[Silvanus]

Malice and gross negligence are frequently legally equivalent.

They're very clearly differently defined, and treated very differently when it comes to homicide.

The person in question here was/is an addict. You know as well as I do that treating the indirect impacts of addiction as identical to malicious crime will have one outcome: preventing addicts from seeking assistance.

For the prosecutor in question (and it is just one: only one prosecutor in California has pursued murder charges for stillbirths, over several decades) its obvious that the punitive aspect is more important to him than preventing the harm. He is happy to pursue the former at the expense of the latter.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

They know they're losing and have to cheat to win

 

[Lykosia]

The State of California prosecuting a meth addict is not "you had a miscarriage, sounds like murder to me". She used meth 3 days before giving birth, and ended up with a dead baby, which they found toxic concentrations of methamphetamine in. She overdosed her unborn child on meth while 8 and a half months pregnant. As an aside, the lawyers defending her used some particularly annoying arguments, including that there is no medical knowledge that meth would cause a stillbirth. No duh, nobody is doing clinical testing on the use of meth in pregnancy.

Nobody wants to prosecute natural or accidental death. The context here is that a large percentage of pregnancies end tragically in miscarriage through no discernable fault of the mother, and abortion advocates want to scare people into thinking those grieving mothers will be dragged to jail , and that's just not going to happen without reason to suspect a crime. If a bear shows up in someone's backyard and mauls their child, nobody would ever even think about criminal charges... unless a video surfaces of the parents throwing the kid out the back door to the bear, and then you bet there's gonna be criminal charges. When a child dies, we assume the parents didn't murder them unless there is reason to think they did. That same logic isn't going to magically not apply to the unborn.

If you had read the article, you would know that there are hundreds of cases. Not just this one. A study from 2013 is mentioned there that found over 400 cases where pregnancy and pregnancy loss was used in investigation and prosecution. And that is in 2013. Experts fear that these cases will sky rocket. Everyone can see where this is going.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

They know they're losing and have to cheat to win

Republicans: "We're the party of small government! We want to give power back to the people!"

Also Republicans: "We know what's best for you. We're not going to let you change the laws we create."

 

[Terminal Blue]

The State of California prosecuting a meth addict is not "you had a miscarriage, sounds like murder to me". She used meth 3 days before giving birth, and ended up with a dead baby, which they found toxic concentrations of methamphetamine in. She overdosed her unborn child on meth while 8 and a half months pregnant.

"Toxic concentrations of methamphetamine" is a useless and redundant phrase. Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin. That doesn't mean it causes people to miscarry.

What you're essentially saying is that if someone drinks a glass of wine and then miscarries, the state can just decide they are guilty of murder if any degree of alcohol is found in their unborn child's body, regardless of whether there is any conceivable mechanism by which their actions could have caused the miscarriage, because alcohol is toxic.

No duh, nobody is doing clinical testing on the use of meth in pregnancy.

They don't need to.

The effects of methamphetamine on the human body are very well understood. Figuring out the effects of methamphetamine during pregnancy is a matter of mathematical modelling.

Nobody wants to prosecute natural or accidental death.

Even if there were medical evidence that methamphetamine could cause miscarriages or did so in this case, it would still be an accidental death.

The context here is that a large percentage of pregnancies end tragically in miscarriage through no discernable fault of the mother, and abortion advocates want to scare people into thinking those grieving mothers will be dragged to jail , and that's just not going to happen without reason to suspect a crime.

And yet, all you are proving is that you have absolutely no problem with dragging grieving mothers to jail as long as you can manufacture some bullshit rationalization by which to declare them responsible..

You're a liar and a hypocrite. Everything you do and are is a lie.

 

[tstorm823]

If you had read the article, you would know that there are hundreds of cases. Not just this one. A study from 2013 is mentioned there that found over 400 cases where pregnancy and pregnancy loss was used in investigation and prosecution. And that is in 2013. Experts fear that these cases will sky rocket. Everyone can see where this is going.

The one is representative. Which you should understand not from me saying so, but from the author using it prominently. It could be 1 case, 400, or a million, if they're all examples of reasonable suspected wrongdoing, you haven't proved the point. Where is there even one case over spontaneous miscarriage? You can read into whatever trend you want, something happening not at all consistently trends to it continuing to not ever happen until shown otherwise.

"Toxic concentrations of methamphetamine" is a useless and redundant phrase. Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin. That doesn't mean it causes people to miscarry.

It wasn't a miscarriage, it was a stillbirth. The baby was dead on arrival, having overdosed on meth in the womb.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Republicans: "We're the party of small government! We want to give power back to the people!"

Also Republicans: "We know what's best for you. We're not going to let you change the laws we create."

Funny how even fucking Bernie Sanders just said the republicans have more adherence to the working class than the democrats...

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Funny how even fucking Bernie Sanders just said the republicans have more adherence to the working class than the democrats...

Can you stay on topic for like, a second?

 

[Terminal Blue]

It wasn't a miscarriage, it was a stillbirth.

It was both.

She was taken to hospital in an ambulance after she started bleeding heavily. She was found to be suffering from several infections of the uterus. Despite the uncontrolled bleeding and clearly abnormal labour, the hospital did not offer her a C-section and did not give her a blood transfusion. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy on the fetus later admitted he had not reviewed her medical records and was not aware of the complications during delivery. The case against her was ultimately dismissed, because you are wrong. You are simply wrong, and you don't care because you are a liar.

What happened in this case is exactly what you are claiming noone wants. A "faith-based" hospital messed up while treating complications in a delivery, took a drug test without consent and then called the police to cover up their mistakes. An activist DA decided to use the case to push a pro-life agenda and indulge some personal crusade to punish a vulnerable drug addict. A pathologist didn't do their fucking job, and as a a result a woman spent 16 months in prison before being released after the prosecution finally admitted they never had any case against her.

For once in your miserable little life, tell the truth to yourself.

 

[Kwak]

Funny how even fucking Bernie Sanders just said the republicans have more adherence to the working class than the democrats...

Adherence to the culture war narratives the working class are brain-washed by Fox into being triggered by, not actual liveable wages, housing regulation, job security and safety, health care.
Just 'liberals are weiiiird and want to destroy your life!' nonsense.

 

[tstorm823]

It was both.

She was taken to hospital in an ambulance after she started bleeding heavily. She was found to be suffering from several infections of the uterus. Despite the uncontrolled bleeding and clearly abnormal labour, the hospital did not offer her a C-section and did not give her a blood transfusion. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy on the fetus later admitted he had not reviewed her medical records and was not aware of the complications during delivery. The case against her was ultimately dismissed, because you are wrong. You are simply wrong, and you don't care because you are a liar.

What happened in this case is exactly what you are claiming noone wants. A "faith-based" hospital messed up while treating complications in a delivery, took a drug test without consent and then called the police to cover up their mistakes. An activist DA decided to use the case to push a pro-life agenda and indulge some personal crusade to punish a vulnerable drug addict. A pathologist didn't do their fucking job, and as a a result a woman spent 16 months in prison before being released after the prosecution finally admitted they never had any case against her.

For once in your miserable little life, tell the truth to yourself.

The case wasn't dismissed "because I'm wrong", it was explicitly on the grounds that that were pursuing murder charges, and the prosecution couldn't demonstrate that she knew meth hurts fetuses. You're using very strong words for someone who is actively lying. Without getting into the relationship between chronic meth use and infections, without getting into the irrelevance of it all when the dead baby is testing positive for meth, you are actually lying.

It's amazing, you are first taking the word of the defense attorneys and preaching it as undisputed fact without even a hint of skepticism, but then still choosing to lie on top of that, because even her literal defense's arguments are insufficient to justify your response to me.

 

[Terminal Blue]

The case wasn't dismissed "because I'm wrong", it was explicitly on the grounds that that were pursuing murder charges, and the prosecution couldn't demonstrate that she knew meth hurts fetuses.

What kind of bullshit..

Methamphetamine is toxic. It has virtually no medicinal use outside of treating a tiny number of people with ADHD who can't be treated with other amphetamines, and even then it's rarely prescribed because the long term effects are considered too dangerous most of the time. Methamphetamine does "hurt fetuses" because it hurts everyone. Exposure to methamphetamine in utero is associated with a range of health problems. What it doesn't do, what it has never been evidenced to do, is to cause stillbirths. Noone "knows" it does that, because it almost certainly doesn't.

You know what has been evidenced to cause stillbirths? Infections of the uterus.

You know what causes the vast majority of stillbirths? Genetics.

You don't seem to have the slightest concept of what door has been opened here. You are creating a world in which anyone who loses a pregnancy or who has a stillborn baby is open season. They forfeit any right to privacy or medical confidentiality, their entire life is now open to scrutiny and any behavior deemed to be "risky" becomes grounds for a murder charge even if there is no real evidence of causality (because there wasn't in this case). Anyone with the slightest credibility could have looked at the medical records in this case, seen that the delivery was clearly abnormal, noted the multiple infections and concluded, correctly, that those infections were the likely cause of the stillbirth.

But no, you want to cling desperately to some unproven theory that methamphetamine causes abnormal delivery and stillbirths. There is no medical evidence that can even happen, but who cares? It must have happened, because the alternative is that you have endorsed putting a grieving person in prison for losing a pregnancy, and while I can't really blame you for not being able to deal with that, it's a shitty, shitty thing.

We already live in a world where women can be arrested or detained for delaying a C-section or be forced to undergo a C-section even if they would not survive. We already live in a world where women can be arrested for wanting to give birth at home rather than in a hospital. This is not a theoretical possibility. It has already happened, because people like you have removed all of the legal protections that prevent it from happening. So lie your little fucking arse off about what you think people "want", and the rest of us will deal with reality.

The worst part is, these laws were introduced with the promise that they would protect pregnant people from violence. Instead, they've made being pregnant grounds for criminal suspicion. Calling these people pro-life is the biggest fucking joke in human history.

 

[Buyetyen]

It must have happened, because the alternative is that you have endorsed putting a grieving person in prison for losing a pregnancy, and while I can't really blame you for not being able to deal with that, it's a shitty, shitty thing.

It's not that he can't deal, he just doesn't give a shit. And once you've decided not to give a shit, you just need an excuse. Any excuse will do. I know I've said all this before, but it's worth repeating because there is no reasoning with people like tstorm. They're just miserable and want everyone else to be as miserable as they are.

 

[tstorm823]

You don't seem to have the slightest concept of what door has been opened here. You are creating a world in which anyone who loses a pregnancy or who has a stillborn baby is open season.

No, this is imaginary. You are taking part in a collective delusion. You're choosing not to process the question of "should there be legal intervention if a mother has 3 children, all test positive for meth, and one dies?" Because that's a question you're going to have different conflicting opinions about even just within your own mind. It's easier to say "this is just cause they hate women and want power over them and they intend to torment all women and must be stopped" than it is to address reality as it is. You prefer having good guys and bad guys so that you don't have to bother with the gray areas.

But no, you want to cling desperately to some unproven theory that methamphetamine causes abnormal delivery and stillbirths. There is no medical evidence that can even happen, but who cares?

Do you know what causes infections and abnormal deliveries? A dead fetus. Do you know what can kill people? Methamphetamine. Why would you parrot the line that meth can't cause these things? Was there meth in her children? Yes. You're not disputing that. Can meth kill people? Yes, you're not disputing that. Why would you ever imagine that meth can't kill a fetus?

 

[Terminal Blue]

You're choosing not to process the question of "should there be legal intervention if a mother has 3 children, all test positive for meth, and one dies?"

Because that question is fucking irrelevant.

One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth (actually, the vast majority of pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth, but most will spontaneously abort long before the pregnancy has even even be noticed). Statistically, some people who have miscarriages or stillbirths will be using recreational drugs, or giving birth at home, or falling down the stairs, or any of the other things pregnant people have been arrested over, and even if there is a clinically evidenced mechanism why their behavior could have caused the miscarriage or stillbirth (which in this case there is not) it does not mean they forfeit their rights to confidentiality or humane treatment.

It's easier to say "this is just cause they hate women and want power over them and they intend to torment all women and must be stopped" than it is to address reality as it is.

Yes, it easier to think that, because it aligns with reality.

If you were in any way consistent or honest in your beliefs, you would be wondering why the DA in this case didn't choose to prosecute the hospital for failing to perform an emergency C-section during a clearly abnormal labor. After all, women have been arrested for refusing to have a C-section. Women have died undergoing court-mandated C-sections against their will. Somehow, you seem entirely capable of rationalizing legal protections for medical professionals whose actions might have contributed to the death of baby, but you will defend putting an innocent woman in prison for over a year at enormous public cost..

We know why, we're not idiots.

I You prefer having good guys and bad guys so that you don't have to bother with the gray areas.

..says the person attempting to rationalize why a vulnerable woman who had a miscarriage deserves to be punished for being a drug addict.

You're wrong. There is evil in this world, it's just extremely banal. It consists of a lot of small, stupid people rationalizing small, stupid things to themselves.

Do you know what causes infections and abnormal deliveries? A dead fetus.

Hold up..

How exactly does someone develop an infection from being pregnant with a dead fetus?

 

[tstorm823]

Because that question is fucking irrelevant.

One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth (actually, the vast majority of pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth, but most will spontaneously abort long before the pregnancy has even even be noticed). Statistically, some people who have miscarriages or stillbirths will be using recreational drugs, or giving birth at home, or falling down the stairs, or any of the other things pregnant people have been arrested over, and even if there is a clinically evidenced mechanism why their behavior could have caused the miscarriage or stillbirth (which in this case there is not) it does not mean they forfeit their rights to confidentiality or humane treatment.

And statistically 0% of them have been treated as murder. Now, sometimes you have an exceptional case, where a woman miscarries after falling down the stairs, and then explicitly tells the medical professionals treating her that she didn't want the baby because her husband was leaving to her, perhaps there's reason there to think maybe she deliberately gave her own offspring a violent death. Perhaps that isn't the same thing as every woman who has ever miscarried.

Hold up..

How exactly does someone develop an infection from being pregnant with a dead fetus?

Stillbirth linked to more childbirth complications for mom, Stanford study finds

Stillbirth greatly raises a woman's risk for severe complications of childbirth, a Stanford study of more than 6 million California births has found.

scopeblog.stanford.edu

Obviously I didn't mean the fetus spontaneously generates a virus or bacteria.