US police use digital data to prosecute abortions
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/06/jennie-linn-mccorma...
ie. Perfectly legal in Australia and well within the range that Saint Hildegard of Bingen prepared and administered abortifacients [1].
[1] https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-...
> an infant which is a danger to her body
> The loss of the fetus was seen as an acceptable price to pay for saving the life of the pregnant woman.
Was Jennie Linn McCormack's life in danger? Or did she just not want another kid?
> among those born at 23 weeks, 55% survived.
The real question is how many lived that weren't aborted?
It is encouraging that half of the children had no or minimal neurodevelopmental impairments at 2 years.
I am sure had she gotten help she wouldn't have aborted this late. She would have gotten an earlier abortion or support for her pregnancy.
My personal experience: My wife had an embryo who stopped showing signs of life. She got pills to abort from her gynecologist and we were sent home. It was grisly. We had remains in the toilet and blood everywhere. We were weeping and grossed out.
So you shouldn't mention the remains in a trashbag in the backyard to accuse her. It's true that she ended the life of the fetus and this is very serious. I am Buddhist and all life is holy.
But the police won't be helpful here at all.
What is magic about week 23 that makes this so cut and dry for you?
The first sentence of the article says "police in Nebraska", then goes on to say "police in Idaho", "police in Arkansas", "Mississippi"...
It's worth pointing out that these states barely have the population of a good sized California county.
A much more accurate title to the article would be "Police in ignorant redneck hayseed states use digital data..."
Also stated: "13 states now ban abortion". Again a more accurate statement "the 13 most low IQ states in the US have banned abortion".
Why anyone with the means to move still lives in those places is the real mystery.
Seriously, If you feel these rights restrictions will affect you, move to California. If you are in a low income bracket, you get free health insurance in California, including abortion...
I read the headline thinking they were using digital medical data, i.e., what insurance companies do. That would be legitimately frightening.
Nope, police are just exploiting bad opsec. Don't bring your phone to your robbery, don't talk about your alleged crimes on Facebook Messenger. Lots of people don't know that these channels are not secure.
(Edit: Abortion is currently illegal in some U.S. jurisdictions. There is debate about whether it should or shouldn't be.)
What I'm saying is, the article was actually about the fact that police are exploiting known insecure channels, not new ones. But the article title was suggesting the police were using new channels to surveil people. And I'm just surprised that many people don't know that phone calls, SMS, Google Searches, and Facebook Messenger can be obtained via subpoena.
"Hah it's a simple case of being a boiled frog, nothing to see here!"
What does?
It well May Be! Facebook is not your Friend, absolutely. I do agree that personal conversations are better had Face to Face.
But blaming oneself, or victims of the Digital Panopticon, for their ineptitude, is very disheartening.
Of -course- they could have had better opsec. But for another Example, of -course- any Suicide victim could have also chosen to "do better" instead. Equally insensitive advice, even if it is true.
However, this is a very serious matter. If found guilty, this person will have a criminal record.
Doing something illegal in the United States is very dangerous, and you should be very careful, as there are lots of known and unknown channels which you can unknowingly get yourself caught.
Once the child is born, then it becomes a member of society and is a social concern. Until then, it's a personal medical issue and sanctimonious citizens have no right to impose their inconsistent religious beliefs upon others.
It's bad policy in bad faith.
- There is an organism that is alive.
- The organism belongs to the human species (as per DNA).
- The organism is separate from the parents (different DNA).
- It's an intervention that results in loss of life.
- It's premeditated (regardless of justification).
Those are all irrefutable facts. The gestation phase doesn't change the facts above.
What do we call a premeditated intervention that results in the loss of life by forced means of an alive member of the human species?
Use any word you want. These semantics will remain the same regardless of which word you use. (edit)
I also do not care about what specific word you use, I care about the implications above.
2) Measure the vital signs of the organism. You will confirm that it is alive.
3) Try the same with other mammals.
Please go ahead and try to falsify this. Have fun.
For an atheist, it's all life so ending the process at any point is technically death. Every sperm is sacred, so to speak.
For a Jew or Christian though, the Bible doesn't consider the unborn to be human until they are birthed. Instead they are considered potentially human. Since it is not human, killing it isn't considered murder.
Evangelicals wrongly believe their Bible considers the unborn to be human, thus their anti-abortion stance. If you look back to the 1960's, Evangelicals were not anti-abortion. That changed in the 1970's and here we are today.
This isn't true.
A fetus in the early stages of development is not alive in the regular sense because it is incapable of independent survival and lacks the requisite organs to sustain itself, experience pain etc.
Most elderly people including yourself some years from now will not be "self-sustainable". You will need help to move around, you will need medications to survive and all sorts of help.
There is a congenital disorder which makes you insensitive to pain. Does that make you not human?
It is a rather dumb argument.
They aren't.
The word murder commonly describes an unjustified killing.
That makes it incompatible with your specification as written.
So you'd have to use a different word here.
1) intervention or event + loss of life = killing
2) killing (1) + of a human + by a human = homicide
3) homicide (2) + premeditation + malice = murder
In the abortion case:
- an intervention takes place resulting in loss of life = an organism is killed (1)
- the organism being killed is human. the intervention is done by a human = a homicide (2)
Now, is it murder? it's as homicide (human killed by human) and it's premeditated. But is there malice? It depends.
Sometimes loss of life is inevitable. Sometimes it is done as a form of euthanasia or eugenics. Sometimes the pregnancy was accidental or involuntary. Sometimes it's due to economic reasons. Sometimes it's simply due to personal preferences or a state of mind... etc.
You can analyze the situation to establish whether the abortion (i.e.: homicide with premeditation) has malice or not, and whether you want to call it "murder" from a moral standpoint. But it remains a homicide with premeditation and should not be taken lightly.
For example, if the reason behind an abortion is solely to kill someone with Down syndrome, I would say there's malice there (eugenics is wrong). A person with Down syndrome is as worthy of life as everyone else, yet they are a frequent target of abortions. Likewise, in some cultures, male offspring is associated with prosperity and are preferred over females, even resulting in abortions based solely on sex. That's also another form of malice.
But if you want to feel happy with yourself and engage into "terminology gerrymandering" (e.g.: it's not alive, it's not a human, it's not a separate organism) or "terminology laundering" (e.g.: it's too small to be a homicide = structuring/smurfing), you'll be only playing yourself. The earlier in life you accept that reality is messed up, and that unfortunate things happen, while valuing human life, the better.
If you want to mix politics, religion, society, medicine, economics, etc. into a big ball of spaghetti resulting in endless arguing in a limbo of unhappy yelling people, you can also do that, but beware that many clever people will take advantage of you in the process. Ultimately, it's your life and you can spend your days as you see fit.
I appreciate the way you lay out your argument but I refuse to agree because if you're right the consequences would be too much to grapple with.
Some abortions are justified, others aren't. A legislative compromise was done that lets unjustified abortions take place, enabling a loophole for eugenics.
If we embark in this eugenics journey, where does it stop? Should everyone with a GPA of less than 4.0 be killed? Should everyone not capable of running a marathon be killed? Should everyone with less than 1000 followers on TikTok be killed? Should everyone not able to name at least 100 Pokemons be killed? Should everyone with a chess ELO below 1000 be killed? Should everyone not able to solve a Rubik's cube be killed? Who defines what the minimum threshold to be worthy of life and reproduction is?
Eugenics is wrong and we should be able to say it. I've met people with Down syndrome who are formidable and inspire me to be a better person. People who have to wake up every morning and be resilient in an unforgiving world. And it makes me sick to think how many of them are being killed.
Steve Jobs was once a homeless person who consumed acid and ate charitable meals at Hare Krishna temples. A hard-line eugenics moron would have probably declared him unworthy of life or reproduction. Likewise, among the brilliant scientists and engineers that once put a man on the moon there are descendants of poor immigrants that arrived to America on boats infested with rodents, fleas and lice, many of whom had low IQ from malnourishment and exposure to pollution, and were also illiterate and unable to read. Eugenics is a stupid doctrine.
For anyone who is not religious, the entire process of procreation through to birth is life. There is no point at which life begins because every part of the process is life. If any part of the process wasn't life, it wouldn't work. Everything the parent said is correct.
The police has to try everything legally possible to investigate a crime. The only new thing here is that right now the law is on the more conservative side.