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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (4257)	1/29/2003 11:19:52 AM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

Could the state have the right to force a woman to have an abortion in a case of rape or incest?

To: Neocon who wrote (4257)	1/29/2003 11:36:32 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

If one were claiming justification for the homicide, you would be correct, but one is not. One is only declining to prosecute under extreme circumstances. This would be true if there were an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors use discretion all the time in deciding whether or not to charge people who have committed what are technically crimes. That's not what you are suggesting, as I take it. I understand that you are suggesting that it is not a crime at all if the woman was raped. That one of the elements of the crime is not having been raped. Or, more accurately, not having reported the event causing pregnancy as rape within so and so many hours of its occurrence. So the statue would read that it is an offense to abort a baby that was not the result of a rape that was reported to the police within so many hours of its occurrence an confirmed by the police to be a rape. (This excludes the consensual sex which the woman worries may have resulted in pregnancy and therefore reports as a rape to entitle her to an abortion in case she gets pregnant.) Of course, this raises another question. Particularly in the case of a younger married woman, the woman may well have had consensul intercourse sometime within a week or so of the rape. If she becomes pregnant, how do you know whether the pregnancy is the result of the consensual sex (not abortable) or of the rape (abortable, under your position)? Do you have to do a DNA test? Suppose a woman had a one night stand with consensual sex with a stranger she met in a bar and the next day gets raped, and she can't locate either the stranger or the rapist for a DNA test? Whose baby is it, and is it abortable? I know I may seem like I'm nitpicking, but with 1.3 million abortions a year some cases like this are bound to come up, and whatever statute you draft will have to be applied to them. Therefore, the better way may be to leave it an offense but allow for proscutorial discretion. Of course this has the downside that if you are in an area with a pro-life prosecutor you're more likely to be prosecuted than you are if you're in an area with a pro-choice prosecutor. Or if there's a strong movement in the community one way or another, since prosecutors are elected officials they may feel they have to be swayed by political pressure. But that's a problem with every statute --the fringes are always the problems. (As with battered womens syndrome about 15 years ago when for awhile in some jurisictions it became an acceptable excuse for killing, until it started to get out of hand and women were exonerted for men killed in their sleep in "self defense.")

To: Neocon who wrote (4257)	2/14/2003 6:54:13 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

One is only declining to prosecute under extreme circumstances. I take your point. Like so many of the fine distinctions I'm fond of making, though, it would be lost in practice. A law making abortion a crime except in cases of rape or incest would come across as aborting being wrong only when the woman did not exercise sufficient discretion, which is a horrid message to send. As an aside, your having to ponder the matter to come up with that point makes it seem like an after the fact rationalization rather than the basis for your position, which was based on something else...