This is a terrible story, but from an ethical enlightenment and focus perspective, I am grateful for it.
A four months pregnant patient at a Prague’s Bulovka University Hospital received an unwanted abortion procedure when doctors got her confused with another woman. (Both patients were not native Czech speakers.) The woman who lost her baby was at the hospital for a routine check-up, but nurses, doctors, a gynecologist and an anesthesiologist all became convinced she was another patient seeking an abortion. They subjected their victim to a surgical cleaning of the uterus without her consent consent or knowledge. She miscarried following the procedure.
Prague police are treating the matter as a case of negligent “bodily harm.” Is that what it is? A woman losing her unborn child is the equivalent of her losing a kidney? Is the unwanted invasion of her body is the issue here, and not the death of whatever that thing is that their outrageous mistake killed?
One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the entire pro-abortion case is built on intellectual dishonesty is the weird and mystical convention that if a mother wants her unborn child to be regarded as a nascent human being, it is in the eyes of the law, in most states. Someone ripping the unborn baby out of the womb of its mother will be usually charged with a crime against two human beings, not one. But if a woman has been taught to regard a gestating fetus as a wart, a tumor or a “mass of cells,” killing it is no crime at all…just a “choice,” or “reproductive care.”
I want to read or hear an abortion activist, or anyone screaming about how the Supreme Court removed a woman’s “right” to control her own body when her body includes a genetically distinct human being, explain how the law should treat a situation like the atrocity in the Czech Republic. Was a child involved or not? Were two human beings harmed, or one?
Were the doctors and the hospital guilty of a negligent tort, as if they had amputated the wrong leg, or was this negligent homicide?
Ethics Alarms 
Isn’t this basically the same as the pharmacist who mistakenly gave abortion medication to the wrong patient. The woman was undergoing IVF and needed her hormones for the transferred embryos to develop. She was given abortion medication instead. The state has said the max liability for the pharmacy is $10,000.
Yes, from a legal standpoint, identical, just more compelling from a visceral standpoint.
Putting the popcorn on the stove right now for this one…
Anyone who still says SCOTUS took away a woman’s right to butcher her unborn child is either stupid, delusional, or a liar. Last I saw (I think on this site), the number of abortions in the US since Roe v. Wade was overturned has gone up in nearly every state.
That’s a horrible story, by the way. Negligent homicide it should be, but it’s the Czech Republic, so…
The legal dilemma reminds me of the aftermath of the Real IRA’s bombing in the small Northern Irish town of Omagh in 1998. A memorial to the victims was delayed for years because the powers that be couldn’t decide if the death count was 29 or 31, as one of the victims was a woman pregnant with twins.
The protection of innocent life is not just a political issue, but, much more importantly, it is a basic political responsibility. We cannot cannot legitimately believe that, if we support programs for the poor and marginalized, this ‘makes up’ for not being consistently prolife. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
The concept that human life has intrinsic value is a Christian one. As Christianity declines and the official state paganism takes over, fewer and fewer people will respect human life.
Unfortunately true.
Either that poor woman’s baby was just a clump of cells, or it was negligent homicide.
Can’t have it both ways.
You can’t with a European Enlightenment mindset. However, with a new-age woke pagan mindset, everything is magical. If you ‘will’ it to be a baby, it is a baby. If you will it to be a clump of cells, it is a clump of cells. You can ‘manifest’ it depending on your wishes.
The simple and consistent answer is that it’s negligent bodily harm until the point at which the woman is prohibited from getting an abortion except for medical necessity, at which point it’s negligent homicide. People can obviously still sue for emotional damages. They’re entitled to develop emotional attachments to their nascent human organism at any point in its development, which is probably good if they intend to raise the child.
She was 4 months, or about 17-18 weeks, and according to the article, it’s only legal after 12 weeks for medical necessity. Homicide it is.
Probably.
While I might agree with the legalese of this thinking, I completely disagree with it from a moral, ethical perspective. Furthermore, while it’s simple, it doesn’t seem consistent…it’s certainly not consistent from the perspective of the one in the womb, because it gives very short shrift to the unborn child’s right to life.
Is this “entity” inside a woman merely a clump of cells until the time when an abortion is illegal, at which point it magically transforms to a human life? Viability is a constantly-moving spectrum. Babies can now live having been delivered at twenty to twenty-one weeks gestation…an outcome deemed impossible a generation ago. What happens when science – in another thirty years – chops more weeks off that number?
Using Phlinn’s statement, aborting a baby at eleven weeks – when it’s not viable outside the womb – is roughly the same as removing my spleen without permission. But aborting one week later – at twelve weeks, when it’s still not viable – is the same as putting a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger. Does that sound right?!?
It might be consistent legally, because it’s an on-paper law that can be implemented, but how is that remotely moral or ethical for the unborn? One week, the unborn is nothing. The next, it’s a baby with rights.
I’m not buying this logic at all. An unborn baby at eleven weeks is just as viable as one at twelve weeks, and should be afforded the same rights and protections. This is the madness of setting arbitrary protections on the unborn. It’s unfair, it’s inconsistent, and when enforced, is still reprehensible.
My thoughts…chew carefully before swallowing.
No, I’m not saying that human life should be arbitrarily defined by the law. I’m saying the law should be written as non-arbitrarily as possible to reflect biological reality.
The idea is that for at some time during its gestation, the human organism doesn’t have a perspective. Ideally, we would write the law such that protections for the unborn come into effect shortly before it can have a perspective, to err on the side of caution.
Whether a human organism is developed enough to have subjective experiences is not the same as whether human technology can keep it alive outside of a womb. The technology just gives us the option of safely removing a fetus and hoping someone wants to raise it.
Look at the logic for the other end of a human’s lifespan. The ethical difference between a living human and a cadaver is a fully-functioning human brain. We treat cadavers with respect for our own sakes, not for the sake of the deceased. The same difference applies with a developing human organism, except that a fully-functioning human brain enters existence more slowly than it usually leaves.
Does that make sense?
The simple and consistent answer is that it’s negligent bodily harm until the point at which the woman is prohibited from getting an abortion except for medical necessity, at which point it’s negligent homicide.
Except that is neither simple, nor consistent. That approach accords different value to human lives: the life of the unborn child of the woman seeking an abortion was less valuable than the one hoping to carry her child to term. And it isn’t consistent, either, because different jurisdictions have varying definitions for when an abortion is prohibited except for medical necessity.
Here is a simple and consistent answer. At every moment in everyone’s life, there are only two ways to die: natural causes, or homicide. There is no third option, and there is no tick of the clock before which this isn’t true. Therefore, abortion is always some form of homicide. The vast majority of abortions are indistinguishable from murders of convenience.
Of course, simple and consistent leads to uncomfortable conclusions. Abortions of pregnancies due to rape or incest are homicides. Destroying IVF embryos is homicide.
By definition.
That the burdens of pregnancy rest solely upon women isn’t fair. Nature isn’t fair. What constitutes homicide has nothing to do with fairness.
It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense?
Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense?
Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests.
Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.
Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.
Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.
Abortion intentionally deprives that existence, whether it has yet achieved personhood, of the potential for doing so. Abortion is homicide because it, by definition, it ends ends existence sooner than natural causes would have done. The concept of personhood, even if it exists, is irrelevant.
There still remain two ways to die: natural cause, or homicide. This conclusion doesn’t rely upon religion, or presumed states of existence. It is true, regardless of either.
So far as I know, my argument, which comes at the problem from completely the opposite direction from when morally meaningful life begins, but rather the manner in which every life must end, is my own. (Translated into reality: no doubt others have made it, thereby exposing my ignorance. But I haven’t seen it widely enough presented for me to be aware of it.)
There may well be gaping holes in my argument of which I am wholly unaware. But if there aren’t, then the consequences are unsparing: IVF wastage is homicide; exceptions for rape and incest are homicide; all elective abortions are homicides.
But some homicides are justifiable. Those undertaken to prevent the likelihood of death or significant injury to the mother constitute self-defense just as much as shooting a home invader.
So, near as I can conclude, there is no logically consistent defense for any abortion undertaken for any reason other than in defense of the mother from death or physical injury.
Almost all abortions are murders of convenience. QED.
COTD.