This is tragic. Women should have access to abortion, and 23 weeks is plenty, but miscarrying and burying it in the backyard needs an investigation. Just to make sure we have all the facts.
23 weeks is the size of a grapefruit. 12 weeks is the size of the lime; is that small enough for you that you wouldn't put a woman going through the trauma of a miscarriage (or abortion) through criminal investigation?
Do we need to automatically assume that when a woman wants to not just flush it down the toilet like waste that is reason for suspicion?
May you never have a partner who has a miscarriage and then has to decide whether to put themselves at the mercy of the criminal system whether they go through "proper channels".
23 weeks is also more or less the borderline for where we have standardized national practices for saving an extreme premature delivery. I've read studies that put viability in the NICU at week 23 anywhere from 10% on the extreme low end, to 50% on the extreme high. By week 24 that jumps to ~30-75%.
No comment on the general issue of abortion. Question remains for those who push this line as to which body part is that? A fetus is clearly an organism growing inside of someone's body but it is not a "body part" of another organism.
Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre and quite dangerous. Some weird facts:
- Fertilization doesn't even happen until the 2nd or 3rd week.
- Pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus, which quickly leads to ruptured organs and death for the mother.
- 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage.
- The fetus's cells float freely in the mother's blood plasma, which makes the mother a chimera.
- A mother's blood can develop antibodies to rhesus antigens in the baby's blood, identifying the baby as a foreign invader.
- A fetus's "coating" has genes that inhibit T-cells in the mother, which is the only way the mother's body doesn't destroy the fetus (which is an alien parasite to the mother/host).
- Fetal stem cells can travel throughout the mother to repair things - or create an immune disorder.
- Women grow an extra organ (the placenta) during pregnancy.
- During development, a female fetus develops all the eggs the adult form will carry throughout its lifetime.
- Amniotic fluid is fetus pee.
- A fetus can't survive outside the uterus before 23-25 weeks.
Is the umbilical part of the mother's body? "The umbilical cord develops from and contains remnants of the yolk sac and allantois. It forms by the fifth week of development, replacing the yolk sac as the source of nutrients for the embryo" per wiki. The process definitely reminds of parasitical organisms, in parts.
> Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre
Honestly I still am having problems wrapping my head around the basic fact of existence. Reality is bizarre.