“OK, now where’s my gavel?”
You have to hand it to the Brits: I would have thought that it was impossible to come up with an abortion ruling that simultaneously violates the core principles of both pro- and anti-abortion advocates. Mostly, however, the ruling places one more slippery slope quiver among the anti-abortion movement’s metaphorical arrows. This is what can happen when unborn human life is accorded no respect whatsoever.
Yesterday, Justice Nathalie Lieven issued the ruling at the Court of Protection, which hears cases on issues relating to people who lack the mental capability to make decisions for themselves. She ordered an abortion for a mentally-disabled woman who is 22 weeks pregnant, although both she and her mother wanted the baby to be born. The judge said the decision was in the best interests of the woman, and, of course, the Court knows best. Presumably it did not think the abortion was in the best interests of the unborn child, which apparently was healthy and unimpaired.
But I’m just guessing at that.
The unidentified woman is in her 20s and reportedly has the mental capacity of a 6- to 9-year-old child. Nobody is certain how she became pregnant, but obviously that was not a determining factor in the decision, nor should it have been. The unborn child doesn’t care.
“I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the state to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion,” Justice Lieven said, but held that in the woman’s “best interests, not on society’s views of termination,” the baby must go. Wait, what? How is aborting a child that both the potential mother and her own mother want to have and care for in the woman’s best interests? Or anyone’s best interests, other than members of the “It’s no baby, its an invading clump of cells that you better kill fast before it grows anymore” cult?
The judge based the ruling on consideration of the British abortion laws, the 2005 Mental Capacity Act, and evidence presented at the hearing. There was no evidence presented that the woman’s fetus was impaired; the 2005 Mental Capacity Act allows a mother to terminate a pregnancy if there is a significant risk of the child being born seriously disabled. The judge said, however that even though the woman wanted to keep the baby, shedoubted whether the woman had any sense of what having a baby “meant.”
Ah! Better be safe than sorry, then! Kill the baby!
“I think she would like to have a baby in the same way she would like to have a nice doll,” the judge said. (I have read studies that suggest that unwed teens within normal ranges of intelligence often get pregnant for the same reason. So now a mother’s lack of understanding of the responsibilities of motherhood can justify an abortion? Cool! ) As if that wasn’t enough speculation in a life and death decision, the judge posited that the grandmother, who said that she would accept responsibility for caring for the child, might have to leave the mother and the home at some point.
Or get hit by a bus. Or decide to join a group of traveling mimes. THEN what? Better kill the baby and avoid such unforeseeable results.
After all, said the judge, the woman would suffer more if the baby was brought to term and taken away to foster care or for adoption than if pregnancy was terminated, because then her doll would have become a real baby.
Yeah, no doubt about it. It’s safer all around to kill the baby. For the good of all concerned. All concerned who matter, anyway.
The British group Abortion Rights, the U.K,’s version of NARAL, tried to sputter its way out of this, calling the case “sad and complex, and adding, “As heartbreaking as this case is, it is opportunistic for anti-choice organizations to use it to attack a woman’s right to choose. One in three women will have an abortion in the U.K. for many, many individual reasons, and we shouldn’t undermine free, safe, legal abortion based on one difficult case.”
On the contrary, the case stands for the brutal proposition that it is better to end a life than risk the mother becoming upset at some point in the future, and that the government can decide to kill an inborn child even when the mother “chooses” to let it be born. The case demonstrates the potential illogical and unethical end-results of a system that accords no respect to nascent human life. It’s not “opportunistic” for anti-abortion groups to point to the case and ask the public to consider what it represents. It is mandatory.
Breaking: A three-judge panel overturned the decision today following an appeal filed by the mother, a Nigerian immigrant and former midwife who opposes the abortion and offered to care for the child. The three judges — Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King, and Lord Justice Peter Jackson — said they would provide their rationale for overturning the previous ruling at a later date.
Ethics Alarms 
This opinion is so poorly reasoned, it begs the question how she got a judge position in the first place.
Reportedly the judge has the mental capacity of a 6-9 year-old…
This is Hitlerian in many respects: The Nazis first concentrated on eliminating the mentally ill or deficient as it was determined that they would be useless to the state. I’m somewhat surprised that this judge didn’t order the mentally deficient woman sterilized as she might wind up having another baby. This whole story is depressing but congrats to you for bring it up to light.
And you correctly IDed where another slippery slope involved ends.
The Court of Protection sounds like it would fit right in with the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty.
What other precedents would this set. Could the court order removal of life support if the patient has a traumatic brain injury? Can the judge decree that vaccinations are not in the best interest of the child because she is an anti-vaxxer?
The judge should ask would she want another to decide what is in her best interests. Present her with this scenario, she or her child is in an accident and a third party decides the treatment costs outweigh the benefits and uses the best interests argument to justify that decision.
Ah, but it’s Britain. They already accept that the state gets to decide when to pull the plug. The NHS, as far as I know, still uses the actuarial quality-of-life-years to determine how much the supposed quality of a given life is worth in terms of cold, hard cash. The ministry of life determines when your life isnt worth living anymore, and pulls the plug – financially, anyway. Wouldn’t want people grumbling about death panels wanting to kill anyone’s grandmothers (despite the fact that such accounting features and decisions are an inevitable feature in any socialized health care system.)
In the UK, the crown still outright owns people, without having paid a farthing for them. The government decides who lives, who dies, who gets to own guns, who gets to own kitchen knives, who gets to speak up, and who gets to sit quietly back down. Sure is a good thing we revolted s few years back. Americans would never put up with such intrusive government, right?
Ask me again after the Democrats decide who they’re putting up in 2020. And once more after November of that same year.
“Could the court order removal of life support if the patient has a traumatic brain injury?”
That ship has kind of sailed already, and we talked about it here. I can’t find the exact post, but it was the story of a court interfering not only by saying that the parents of a terminally ill child could not receive care, but also prevented them from moving their child to America so they could try experimental treatments on their own dime.
I’m very thankful I’m not British, it seems like they just can’t so anything right right now.
They forgot to mention in this ruling that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”. This reminds me of the Charlie Gard case, where basically the UK Govt asserts the fact, that they own you, and they will do with you as they see fit. This seems to be a general trend in the UK. Progressives are envious of how “forward thinking” Europe is…
YES! This was the case I was thinking of above. Thank you!
To both you and Mr. Humble Talent, Charlie Gard is an excellent example, but if you want further proof, there’s the Alfie Evans case too.
This is a combination of several slippery slopes.
As already mentioned:
1) Elimination of the weak.
2) An end point of what happens when unborn babies aren’t seen as living humans.
But also:
3) The end result of a state run medical industry. Just as soon as you might become an additional medical cost on the society, the state will kill you.
“Just as soon as you might become an additional medical cost on the society, the state will kill you.”
…unless you are the RIGHT sort of person, with wealth, connections, or certain embarrassing pictures of such persons waiting for your sudden demise to be released to the appropriate media outlets.
Would our Gover-n-ment do that? Wait a minute…there’s three black SUV’s pulling into my drive-way…men are getting out…THEY’RE HERE…
There is a lot of stuff going on in this story. First, the mother and the soon-to-be-grandmother are from Nigeria. The pregnant woman is under the “care” of the British National Health Service trust, which means to be that the pregnant woman must have been declared a “ward of the state” as a result of mental incapacity, thereby granting the British government control over the pregnant woman and her health care decisions, which I guess includes abortions. The NHS trust sought permission to abort the baby; the Nigerian mother and her mother did not seek the abortion.
Under Britain’s 1967 Abortion Act, abortions can be performed up to the 24th week of pregnancy. A section of the abortion act allows the termination of a pregnancy if there is a significant risk of the baby’s being born seriously disabled. Otherwise, abortions must take place during the first six months of pregnancy. And, Justice Nathalie Lieven handed down the decision at the Court of Protection, which hears cases on issues relating to people who are considered to lack the mental capability to make decisions for themselves. The Disability Rights Commission denounced the decision.
So, the national health care system made a decision that a mentally challenged woman should be forced to abort her child because the state decided she may not entirely understand the consequences of motherhood.
jvb
A woman whose unborn baby was killed in a 2018 Pleasant Grove shooting has now been indicted in the death.
Marshae Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham woman, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge. She was taken into custody on Wednesday.
Though Jones didn’t fire the shots that killed her unborn baby girl, authorities say she initiated the dispute that led to the gunfire.