His attorneys argued in a motion filed last week that the arrangement protects him from criminal prosecution in Maryland because Brigham administered drugs that killed the fetuses while the patients were in New Jersey. He then extracted the fetuses at his clinic in Elkton, Md.
In case you thought Canadian abortion advocate Joyce Arthur was anything other than either a liar or an ignoramus, here's evidence that she has trouble getting her facts straight.
In the United States, where fetuses do have legal personhood rights in at least 38 states (mostly through "fetal homicide" laws supposedly aimed at third parties who assault pregnant women), the laws are used primarily to prosecute pregnant women for drug or alcohol abuse, refusing a caesarean, or even experiencing a stillbirth. These unjust and cruel prosecutions tend to scare pregnant women away from prenatal care or even push them to have an abortion. They also turn pregnant women into third-class citizens whose rights are subordinate to those of their fetus.There's a reason she provides no evidence for this ridiculous assertion, especially considering a number of the laws in question expressly exempt pregnant women.
There's also this great tidbit which highlights why you won't see Arthur agree to debate abortion:
To come back to Woodworth's challenge about whether the fetus is human, he completely misses the point because he's confusing the medical/biological aspects of "what is a human being" with the legal/social aspects of personhood. The biological status of the fetus is irrelevant since women need and have abortions anyway.You silly thing, who cares if the unborn are human beings? Women need abortions.
The Raw Story has a longer video of the Occupy Pro-Choice protesters who interrupted a prolife event during the March for Life. Who signs up to continuously repeat lame decades-old chants?
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The fetal homicide laws are indeed used mostly to prosecute pregnant women: www.arcc-cdac.ca/presentations/rebuttal-to-ken-epp.pdf
ReplyDeleteIf you think that PDF proves that fetal homicide laws "are used primarily" to prosecute pregnant women, you must have difficulty understanding what primarily means.
ReplyDeleteThere's not a shred of evidence in the document purporting that the laws are used primarily against pregnant women. ARCC asserts that NAPW asserts that for one state (South Carolina) the law has been used to arrest more women than men. That's a much different claim than saying the state laws in general have been used primarily to prosecute women.
The NAPW can then only come up with two other states (Tennessee and Missouri) where women were convicted under the state's fetal homicide law.
NAPW also claims between 89 and 300 women have been arrested by South Carolina's law - well - which is it? That's a huge spread and makes me question the integrity of any of their research.