UPDATE: Several folks in the comments, especially Portia and Radfem, read more closely than I did and noticed that there’s a disturbing pattern here; regardless of whether or not she really did want him to hit her to cause a miscarraige, the boyfriend is an abuser.
From the Houston Press:
“Later that morning, Davis and Lieutenant Mike Shapaka picked up Jerry at Lufkin High School for questioning. In the interview room, Jerry admitted to hitting Erica the night before, but only on the arms. He’d been out with friends, he said, and she tore into him about coming home so late. So he hit her a few times, just to get her to leave him alone.
Davis and Shapaka asked if he’d ever hit Erica before.
Yes, he said, but he always aimed for the arms.
As Thomas wrote:
If he was only attacking the fetuses there would be, at most, a strray bruise here or there. He’s a liar. His admitted abuse, and his likely pattern of abuse, also brings into question whether she really wanted to terminate the pregnancy, or was coerced into that by her boyfriend. (From my view on abortion, it follows that she had an absolute right to carry the pregnancy to term, and she’s entitled to be vindicated for the deprivation of that right as well.)
Like I said, if _all_ he did was help attack fetuses in her body with her consent, I have no problem with it. But that’s not what happened here. If he coerced her to terminate a pregnancy, threatened her or abused her (and he admits that he did), then he belongs in jail (for abusing her, not the fetuses, to which I concede no rights). The articles you supplied, Radfem, makes it clear to me that the latter is what happened, which totally alters my view of what ought to happen to this guy. He wasn’t trying to help her terminate an unwanted pregnancy. He was abusing her, and maybe forcing her to terminate a pregnancy that, whether planned or not, she had not freely chosen to terminate.
Clearly I posted too soon. My apologies to everyone for screwing this one up, and thank you Radfem and Portia for spotting my error.
Original post follows.
As far as I can tell – and it’s hard to know for certain – the story here is that a 16-year-old pregnant girl, Erica Basoria, and her boyfriend, Gerardo Flores, jointly agreed to abort her sixteen-week pregnancy by beating her around the stomach. None of the news stories I’ve read explains why they didn’t go to a doctor. Maybe they were just too stupid and scared and afraid of being found out; or maybe pro-lifers have succeeded in removing all practical access to abortion where these kids live.
Under Texas’ fetal protection law, a mother can never be charged for “murdering” her own fetus – but someone else can (there’s an exemption for health care providers). She was pregnant with twins, so the boyfriend has been found guilty of a double homicide and, unless the case is successfully appealed, will spend the rest of his life in prison.
This appalling injustice is what happens when pro-lifers control the law; and the prosecutor made it clear that if he could, he’d have sent the mother up for life, too.
From the Lufkin Daily News:
Nineteen-year-old Gerardo Flores of Lufkin was sentenced to life in prison Monday in a landmark test case of a state fetal protection law. An Angelina County jury deliberated just under four hours, finding him guilty on two counts of capital murder for his part in killing his unborn twins.
The case will be appealed, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, defense attorney Ryan Deaton said after the verdict. […]
Flores’ girlfriend, Erica Basoria, 17, was led sobbing from the Angelina County Courthouse by her mother and older sister. While her family testified against Flores, Basoria stood by his side, maintaining she was involved in causing the at-home miscarriage.
Flores’ mother, Norma Flores, stood in stunned silence, surrounded by family members for several minutes after her son was led away by Sheriff Kent Henson.
Under state law, a woman cannot be charged for causing the deaths of her own fetuses for any reason. A similar federal law went into effect in April 2004, a month before Flores was charged.
Bauereiss told jurors he was focused on Flores. He couldn’t help that Basoria was outside the reach of the law, he said. If the babies had been killed after being born, it wouldn’t have been so controversial, he said.
“Think what a horrible crime this would be,”? he said. “We wouldn’t hesitate to label it for what it is.”?
Another twist: It seems possible, and maybe even likely, that the fetuses were dead before Flores ever began participating in the amateur abortion attempt. From an earlier article:
Flores was first indicted for allegedly causing the babies’ deaths after assaulting Basoria the night of May 6, 2004. He admitted to beating her hours before the miscarriage, and to stepping on her pregnant belly several times the week before. His indictment was later amended after news of Basoria’s alleged involvement in the deaths.
Dr. Tommy J. Brown, forensic pathologist for the Jefferson County morgue, performed autopsies on the twins.
The babies had likely been dead in Basoria’s womb for days before the May 7 assault, Brown said Thursday. The cause of death was ruled a homicide by blunt force trauma, according to his autopsy report.
As a photo of the miscarried fetuses circulated among jurors, most of the seven-woman, five-man panel couldn’t seem to bring themselves to do more than glance at it, quickly passing it on.
Brown admitted under questioning by defense attorney Ryan Deaton that he wasn’t able to determine whether Basoria or Flores caused the deaths.
I really wish they had been willing or able to go to a doctor and have an abortion done. But abortion – whether it’s done by a competant medical professional, or by two stupid and scared teens – is not the same thing as murder, and life in prison for this is disgusting.
The defense attorney tried to blame the whole thing on the girl, of course. Didn’t fly with the jury.
Note that the mother’s wishes are – as always, with pro-lifers – entirely irrelevant. Really, I’m amazed that they didn’t go for the death penalty.
Civil Commotion and U235 have posted on this; I haven’t seen any other blogs mention this yet.
In Texas, under-18s need their parents’ permission before getting an abortion. I haven’t found the exact statute yet, but I think it has to be the custodial parent, and if you have two custodial parents, you have to get permission from both. In a recently signed law, this restriction has been amended to specify written permission. So probably this girl didn’t want to go through the parental permission loop, for whatever reason.
But abortion – whether it’s done by a competant medical professional, or by two stupid and scared teens – is not the same thing as murder
A pregnant woman is assaulted by her bastard ex-husband, who doesn’t want her carrying “his” kids. So he kills her fetus. What should he be charged with?
You would doubtless argue that whatever he should be charged with, it shouldn’t be murder. But you would also argue that if the woman wanted to keep the child, then he’s harmed her and the law should take her side. Legislators in Texas agreed with you, and created a new law so that fetus-killers could be punished without having to define killing a fetus as murder, which would cause constitutional problems and would probably be overturned.
So the issue here isn’t the law; this is a pro-choice law. The issue is with a prosecutor choosing to use the law to advance his own agenda (and probably make points with the electorate for his own political ambitions).
This prosecutor seems to be a jerk. I feel very sorry for the young man; he’s stupid, rather than evil. But your notation, “this is what happens when pro-lifers control the law” is absurd. If pro-lifers controlled the law, this law wouldn’t be on the books. (Can’t prosecute a woman for killing her own fetuses, can’t prosecute a health care provider for doing an abortion.)
It would be fairer to say, this is what happens when legislators (some pro-choice, some pro-life) craft laws without considering the reality of who is going to be the executor of the law. You pass a hate crimes law in Mississippi, you’re going to be watching black people get arrested for preaching Islam.
Hold up: a 19-year old man who beats his pregnant, 16-year-old girlfriend is not “stupid.” He’s an abuser. And the 16-year-old girlfriend is not “stupid,” either, she’s a victim both of abuse AND (arguably) statutory rape. With all the statistics floating about regarding the number of teenage pregnancies involving men more than two years older than the women, it’s disingenuous at best to treat these two people as though they’re equal.
He didn’t beat her, Portia. He stomped on her stomach in an attempt to induce miscarriage, with her cooperation. They both wanted those babies out of there; the only difference is that the law protects her actions.
Or so I understand from the story.
This is interesting, from the second linked article:
“What does the law say about interviewing high-school age kids with learning disabilities?” Deaton countered.
Age 18 at the time of the alleged murders, Flores was an adult, and not a juvenile, Assistant District Attorney Art Bauereiss objected.
Deaton has made passing references in jury selection and at trial to Flores’ lack of responsibility for his own behavior due to an alleged learning disability. ”
Not only was he asked to help abort the baby, he was encouraged to beat her as she was beating herself, and he has a learning disability. No way in hell should he be in jail for life. That is freakin’ absurd.
Unless profound (i.e. deep mental retardation), learning disabilities have no bearing on an individual’s responsibility for their own behavior.
Portia: Pretty much, what Robert said. To cast this as a case of an abusive boyfriend, you’d have to assume the girl is lying. Which she might be, but we can’ t know that for sure.
Also, at the time of the incident, she was 16 and he was 18 (unless I’ve gotten things confused, which I might have). I do see a 2-year age difference as different from what I generally think of as statutory rape, although I’m certainly not saying such a relationship [i]couldn’t[/i] be exploitative and wrong. But when the ages are close, I think we have to look at the individuals involved before casting judgements.
I’m not sure what Texas law says about it. Most statutory rape laws have exemptions for when the two people are close in age to each other.
The parental consent law was passed yesterday. This was just a parental notification issue. We can expect to see an outpouring of DIY abortion attempts with teenagers now that parental consent is required on top of notification.
The boy beat the girl at her request. He should not go to jail. The “exception” for the mother in these cases is to comply with Roe v. Wade but also to make people angry that men have gotten swept up in anti-abortion laws that most people feel should only punish women for sexual behavior.
There is a two year “Romeo and Juliet” protection for our statutory rape laws, as there should be. God knows my boyfriend was 18 when I was 16 and he was hardly a criminal.
I blogged about this story this morning. I’m as appalled as you are.
Yeah, it’s what happens when we take away the right to choose. And how we call this murder, on any planet, even planet Texas, is beyond me.
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I don’t mean to give Robert a heart attack here, but he’s right. The law itself isn’t the problem. And as the news reports are rather vague at this point, it’s a mistake to assume we have all the facts and are sure the young man is all that innocent.
There’s a reason the law has an exemption for health-care providers. Do we really want abusers who beat their partners to be able to say “But, Your Honor, she *asked* me to do it”?
As to why she didn’t have an abortion, Kevin Drum points out (citing from a newspaper account) that a bill was passed in 2003 that
And as the article you link to says “Basoria, then 16, was five months pregnant”, which is more than 16 weeks. Which, partly at least, lays some of the blame on the laws of Texas.
Not a pretty story, but as it stands, there is no way he deserves life.
Bean, from all the reports I saw, she had been beating herself several times a day for approximately a week before asking her boyfriend to stand on her stomach.
Mythago, not to put too fine a point on it, but you have this one WRONG.
If my mother-in-law calls the police and I’m arrested for the bruises on my wife’s breasts that result from a consensual s/m scene, should I be barred from putting her on the stand to testify that she in fact consented to that scene? If some nosy neighnor call the police and tells them my wife is beating me and kicking me in the testicles, should they ignore me when I’m alone in the room with them and I say, “no, officers, really, we do heavy s/m all the time. My balls hurt, then it goes away. Nothing wrong here”?
There are problems with prosecuting domestic violence. Everyone reading this blog knows that (lurking MRA trolls excluded), and I do think that the prosecution should go forward if there is sufficient evidence even if the complainant is afraid to go forward, or even doesn’t want to. But that’s not the same as saying that consent is irrelevant. I will never accept that my wife’s consent is irrelevant.
Basically, this boy is going to be a sacrificial lamb to open the door to prosectute women after Roe v. Wade is overturned for throwing themselves down stairs, getting wildly drunk every day and various other methods of trying to induce miscarriage that women report from the pre-Roe days.
If it was 16 weeks, here’s what the “stupid and scared kids” beat to death (times two).
http://health.allrefer.com/health/fetal-development-16-week-fetus.html
If it was five months, as other sources say, then:
http://impiousdigest.com/05mos2.jpg
(The pics aren’t gory.)
They didn’t have good options, perhaps (the Planned Parenthood in Lufkin, Texas does not do abortions, and has come under violent attack anyway). I imagine they learn abstinence only, if that, in such a town.
But absolutely these “kids” did something wrong. The problem with the abortion debate is seeming to speak in absolutes. This law prosecutes people the moment of conception. But on the other side, suggesting that this crime was not a crime is also too extreme.
Mythago is right. If you allow consent as a defense, you open youself up to 1000 “she asked for its” for every case like the one above.
Sorry, but this story says, He admitted to beating her hours before the miscarriage, and to stepping on her pregnant belly several times the week before.
We don’t have to believe that she’s lying in order to say that he abused her. Nor is the s/m issue of consent germane; he did irreparable harm, and she was CLEARLY under duress.
And no, while I understand the very tricky, sensitive subject of what is and is not statutory rape, I don’t think that because the law in this case might say it’s really okay, it means the feminist reading of statutory rape issues is automatically wiped clean. Especially not in a case like this. To paint their actions and options as equal is, in my view, incorrect.
This boy hit the girl because he and she couldn’t figure out another way to induce miscarriage. He is not guilty of abuse; he was trying to help her. The state, I’m afraid, is guilty of abuse.
Hitting someone for the purpose of helping them, wow. This couple has more serious problems than merely being unable to have access to an abortion. Major problems, which will probably be brushed aside as this has turned into a legal, moral issue surrounding whether or not a fetus is a human life.
A woman allowing herself to be beaten and a man beating a woman b/c she asked him to, wow. A lot of people reading or hearing about that, without blinking an eyelash. I almost have as much problem with that.
DV is always problemic in terms of testimony, b/c at least in my county, 80 percent of all female victims recant, usually within 48 hours. Others deny that anything happened, which is why more information is necessary to .
All that said, I do think the law itself is stupid. The sentence is ridiculous, but then most mandatory minimum sentences are. I think Texas’s law is wrong. But then I think Scott Peterson being convicted for killing Laci Peterson’s fetus is wrong, even though I think he’s scum for what he did. It is a disturbing slope to be sliding down into.
I did have some questions, when I read articles that stated her face was also bruised as well as other areas besides her abdoman. Where did these bruises come from? And when?
Portia, when you say “he did irreparable harm,” either you’re talking about killing fetuses that she wanted to terminate, or you’re making it up. The article does not describe any “irreparable harm” to here. If you want to define terminating fetuses she didn’t want as irreparable harm to her, they you’re pretty much on your own.
So here’s what we’ve got: he used force to accomplish a half-assed medical procedure, with her consent. She was under duress because she was pregnant and didn’t want to be, but if that invalidates her consent than it would invalidate her consent to a medical procedure as well, conceptually.
Richard Bellamy: the alternative is that every sadomasochist is committing a felony and remains free only at the suffrance of the authorities. Is that what you’re advocating? That we infantilize both men and women because juries are so sexist that we cannot trust them to know a bullshit defense when they hear it?
Are you also advocating revocing the consent defense for rape, because I believe lots of rapists are wrongly acquitted based on consent defenses. We could of course stop that if we just eliminated consent as a defense: penetration equals felony. Then, we could rely on police and prosecutors not to prosecute unless they thought it was “really” rape. Now, I think that’s a silly idea, and I’m sure you do, too. But then, that suggestion would criminalize the kind of sex _you_ have with _your_ partners. Aparently, criminalizing the kind of sex my wife has with me, and telling her to simply hope prosecutors extend their forbearance, is okay with you.
We ought to do what we always have done: keep out the grossly prejudicial, put in the relevant evidence and let a jury decide. Unlike the rape context, where I think (based only on my anecdotal experience) that lots of injustice is done, in the domestic violence context I’m skeptical that juries really believe that a woman with a broken jaw was just doing S/M. I think, when there’s plenty of evidence of violence, the prosecution can go forward and defeat bullshit, made-up consent defenses just fine. And if you have seen any data that suggests otherwise, I’d like to see it. How many DV cases go to trial and produce acquittals, anyway? On the other hand, if consent is not a defense, some fundamentalist prosecutor could just decide to prosecute all the kinky people in his jurisdiction, and keep the jury from even hearing (on relevance grounds) the alleged victim’s own testimony that it was consensual S/M. Now, that sounds like a pretty silly idea to me.
I remember when the original Texas laws were passed.They were written shortly after several sensational stories in the press about women who were shot in robberies and car jackings and their fetuses killed in the process. There was a big outcry in Austin to pass a law giving the death penalty for such felonies. At the time the big issue was whether they could possibly procecute the perps for two murders. Eventually this law popped out.
Of course, many saw though the smoke and knew what the real agenda was, that is, a foot in the door for anti-abortionists, but the only damage control they could do was exempt health care providers and the mother.
Since then, a lot of people have been procecuted, that in my opinion did not fall under the original spirit of the law. Car accident victims that were found responsible for their accidents have been procecuted for example. Procecutors in this state go by the motto – Bigger is better. That is the way District Attorneys are hatched. So what if you have to play a little loose with the law.
But this is not one of those cases.
That boy helped kill a 5 month fetus in a most gruesome and horrible way, if not for the mother, then for the fetus. I only wish they could both be punished.
Sure. Texas has created an atmosphere that discourages abortion, and makes it difficult but not impossible to get one if under 16 weeks. But Texas is not the only state in the union. Other states are just a bus ticket away. Four months is plenty of time to make up your mind.
Radfem, I have not seen an article that says her face was bruised. That would strongly indicate something was going on here besides an assault on the fetuses. If he was abusing her, he belongs in jail. The article Amp linked to only dealt with an assault on the fetuses, which were (much to her chagrin) in her uterus. So, if _all_ he was doing was killing the fetuses by beating them, through her flesh, with her permission, then I have _absolutely_no_problem_with_that_. In a society where the powers that be have ensured that most women her age cannot realistically access abortion services, I’m neither going to criticize her for taking risks to accomplish the same goal, nor am I going to demonize those who help her do it.
In case it isn’t clear, my position on fetal personhood is “absolutely not.” I’m for abortion on demand without apology, so I don’t hem and haw about how she might have kind of sort have done something wrong. I believe it was her absolute right to eliminate those fetuses from her own body, by any means available to her, and it’s the fault of every damned abortion oppponent in the state of Texas that she didn’t have the best care available to her to accomplish that end.
Thomas writes:
Portia, when you say “he did irreparable harm,”? either you’re talking about killing fetuses that she wanted to terminate, or you’re making it up. The article does not describe any “irreparable harm”? to here. If you want to define terminating fetuses she didn’t want as irreparable harm to her, they you’re pretty much on your own.
Thomas, it would be spectacular if you wouldn’t concoct strawman arguments when addressing me. Here’s why:
So here’s what we’ve got: he used force to accomplish a half-assed medical procedure, with her consent. She was under duress because she was pregnant and didn’t want to be, but if that invalidates her consent than it would invalidate her consent to a medical procedure as well, conceptually.
Okay, let’s work a little bit with some basic anatomy and physiology. If I rip your arm off with a chainsaw, I have not, in fact “used force [to] acccomplish [the] half-assed medical procedure” of surgical amputation. And even if we go so far as to assume your arm was gangrenous and you wanted it off anyway, I don’t think that you’d equate, ever, getting drunk with a buddy and having at it with a chainsaw and a nice sterile surgical procedure. I’d go so far as to surmise that you’d consider yourself, yes, harmed. Irreparably.
Clue: stomping on and beating a woman’s abdomen is in NO WAY equivalent to a surgical or medicinal abortion. I have a hard time believing you have to be a woman to understand that. Given that blunt-force trauma to the abdomen is highly likely to result (and may have, in this case, we don’t know) to any number of internal injuries as well as the irrevocable loss of fertility, I’m going to go ahead and say that yes, “irreparable harm” is a good way to describe what (probably, in the reality-based community) happened.
Aside from this quibbling, though, I totally agree with both Radfem and bean and think they’re spot-on.
Here’s one source on the bruises:
http://www.ktre.com/Global/story.asp?S=3418969
excerpt: ”
Flores’ attorney says Basoria had the death of her twin boys all planned out. He says his client wasn’t an abusive boyfriend, but both sides say Basoria had bruises on her arm, leg, and abdomen when she was rushed to the hospital after the miscarriage.
Basoria reportedly denied being beaten by Flores, but a Lufkin police officer who talked with her that night said she cried whenever his name was mentioned. ”
More detailed link:
http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2005-04-28/news/feature.html
exerpts:
“At the hospital, a doctor and nurse noticed bruises on Erica’s face, arms and stomach. They called police, who sent an officer to question the girl. Officer Scott Hamel asked her what had happened. She said nothing had happened, she just bruises easily.
Hamel asked to see her right arm. Erica pulled her sleeve back, revealing a dark bruise around her bicep and tricep, like someone had grabbed her. Hard. Again Hamel asked, and again Erica said she bruised easily. She wouldn’t budge.
Hamel called the station and told his lieutenant Erica’s story. A short time later, Detective John Davis met Hamel, and the two went back inside room 211.
Davis laid it out: He didn’t believe that Erica had bumped into anything. Someone had hit her. Someone like her boyfriend.
Erica cried at the mention of Jerry’s name. Nothing happened, she said.
Twenty minutes after eight, crime scene tech Carol Cloyd photographed the bruises under Erica’s right eye and on her right arm, right wrist and abdomen. The doctor’s subsequent medical report would indicate bruising on her arms “consistent with injuries from a finger grasp to her arm.” Her left breast had an old bruise. ”
———————————————–
“Later that morning, Davis and Lieutenant Mike Shapaka picked up Jerry at Lufkin High School for questioning. In the interview room, Jerry admitted to hitting Erica the night before, but only on the arms. He’d been out with friends, he said, and she tore into him about coming home so late. So he hit her a few times, just to get her to leave him alone.
Davis and Shapaka asked if he’d ever hit Erica before.
Yes, he said, but he always aimed for the arms.
They returned Jerry to school, only to arrest him later that afternoon.
With a videotape and CD recording the interview, Jerry repeated his story. He hit Erica only on the arms. There was nothing new.
The interview over, Shapaka turned off the devices and removed the tape and CDs.
But Jerry told him to wait. He had something more to say.
He told them he did more than hit Erica’s arms. He did something unspeakable. He didn’t want to do it, but she had asked. She had begged.
After Erica’s doctor’s visit a week earlier, Jerry said, she had decided she didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. She’d heard that if someone stood on a pregnant woman’s stomach, you could abort the babies. For days, she’d asked Jerry to do it. He didn’t want to, but ultimately he gave in. ”
——————————————-
>>Okay, let’s work a little bit with some basic anatomy and physiology. If I rip your arm off with a chainsaw, I have not, in fact “used force [to] acccomplish [the] half-assed medical procedure”? of surgical amputation. And even if we go so far as to assume your arm was gangrenous and you wanted it off anyway, I don’t think that you’d equate, ever, getting drunk with a buddy and having at it with a chainsaw and a nice sterile surgical procedure. I’d go so far as to surmise that you’d consider yourself, yes, harmed. Irreparably.>>
…Even if you had no other options for amputating the gangrenous arm? If, say, me and my non-board-certified buddy were out in the wilderness somewhere, with no chance of obtaining a nice, sterile, surgical procedure? If so, then no, I wouldn’t seek to have him either sued for malpractice or thrown in jail for assault. I’d be grateful. It’d be a sucky solution to a horrible problem, but it’s not my friend’s fault that there’s no hospital nearby. Are you seriously saying that that would be the same as someone attacking me at random with a chainsaw and cutting off my arm? Or someone forcing me to undergo a half-assed surgical procedure in lieu of an available safe one?
If her boyfriend was abusive, then of course he deserves to be punished for that. But if he hit her or stomped on her for the sole purpose of terminating her pregnancy because she asked him to, that’s different. The motive is different. The issues of consent are different.
Say a mother has a daughter who gets pregnant and doesn’t want to have a baby. The mother believes that there is no possibility of obtaining a safe and legal abortion for her teenage daughter. She obtains a black-market abortifacient that carries serious risk of sterilization, other injury, or death. If she gives it to her daughter, is she poisoning her child? Is she guilty of attempted murder or child abuse?
What I’m thinking is that if this relationship was abusive, and if hitting and punching was OKAY before the induced miscarriage(which most certainly is NOT even remotely close to being a medical technique, and I can only imagine what the medical profession’s response to that would be) then it’s hard to really know what happened. This is one of those tragic relationships, and this is its outcome. Did anyone in either family give a damn about what was going on, before this happened?
Again, before I get piled on, this is NOT to say I support Texas’s law or support a life sentence for this man. It’s indeed a slippery slope. I’ve learned not to mention allegations of DV when it interfers with the pro-choice/pro-life debate which naturally supercedes all other concerns. The DV issue should have been explored further.
This is just proof that life is damn complicated. That somewhere this young woman learned it was okay or good to be punched, and that is tragic in itself. Was it desperation that taught her that, or did earlier abuse play a role?
excerpt repeated:
“He’d been out with friends, he said, and she tore into him about coming home so late. So he hit her a few times, just to get her to leave him alone. “
>>What I’m thinking is that if this relationship was abusive, and if hitting and punching was OKAY before the induced miscarriage(which most certainly is NOT even remotely close to being a medical technique, and I can only imagine what the medical profession’s response to that would be) then it’s hard to really know what happened. This is one of those tragic relationships, and this is its outcome. Did anyone in either family give a damn about what was going on, before this happened?
Again, before I get piled on, this is NOT to say I support Texas’s law or support a life sentence for this man. It’s indeed a slippery slope. I’ve learned not to mention allegations of DV when it interfers with the pro-choice/pro-life debate which naturally supercedes all other concerns. The DV issue should have been explored further.>>
This I definitely agree with.
The published reports don’t indicate exactly what lesions were responsible for the fetal demises. It is difficult to abort through blunt trauma – pregnant women are in car crashes all the time, and rarely lose the pregnancy through death in utero. (It is more common to see induction of preterm labor of a fetus too immature to survive, but that wasn’t the case here). I would be highly circumspect if I were the forensic pathologist, unless there was a uterine rupture (in which case the woman would likely be dead or admitted to hospital with massive blood loss), I would be reluctant to definitely ascribe fetal death to trauma. Even placental separation from the uterine wall often (usually!) occurs in non-traumatic situations.
Well, that certainly is a very different set of facts. He admits to being an abuser, and the bruise on the breast is evidence of a pattern. The physical evidence is strongly inconsistent with his story, and I think if the charge was assault on this young woman instead of killing the fetuses he still would have been convicted. He could be prosecuted for assault with his own confession that he hit her, corroborated bo the physical evidence of bruises.
If he was only attacking the fetuses there would be, at most, a strray bruise here or there. He’s a liar. His admitted abuse, and his likely pattern of abuse, also brings into question whether she really wanted to terminate the pregnancy, or was coerced into that by her boyfriend. (From my view on abortion, it follows that she had an absolute right to carry the pregnancy to term, and she’s entitled to be vindicated for the deprivation of that right as well.)
Like I said, if _all_ he did was help attack fetuses in her body with her consent, I have no problem with it. But that’s not what happened here. If he coerced her to terminate a pregnancy, threatened her or abused her (and he admits that he did), then he belongs in jail (for abusing her, not the fetuses, to which I concede no rights). The articles you supplied, Radfem, makes it clear to me that the latter is what happened, which totally alters my view of what ought to happen to this guy. He wasn’t trying to help her terminate an unwanted pregnancy. He was abusing her, and maybe forcing her to terminate a pregnancy that, whether planned or not, she had not freely chosen to terminate.
Portia, I was obviously quick on the trigger without all the facts. This guy was abusing this woman. I don’t know whether you were winging a guess or you had read the other news out there, but your point that she was coerced might be spot-on.
The irreparable harm point is still unclear, though. Pretty much everyone is going to agree that an amputation _is_ irreparable harm. Beating the abdomen of a pregnant woman _risks_ irreparable harm. Now, the last time I assumed the story I read was the complete facts, I had in embarrassingly wrong, so I won’t assume that just because nobody has written that she has had harm to her reproductive organs that it means she hasn’t. Maybe she has. I don’t know. Maybe you have information I don’t have.
That still leaves a big problem, though. If a person cannot consent to be hit, then she can’t do S/M, either as a top or a bottom. If we’re talking about a”risk of irreparable harm” standard, that protects most of the conduct that consenting folks do, and maybe all the conduct consenting folks should do. But if the standard is simply, “if you hit your consenting partner, consent is not a defense” then you’re throwing all kinky people to the wolves.
Radfem, we’re crossing comments here, but I wouldn’t ask you to eliminate coersion concerns from the discussion of repro rights. Sure, it complicates the debate, but I’m really not okay with men forcing women to terminate pregnancies, any more than I’m okay with men forcing women not to terminate them. Choice means the choice of the person whose body is attached to the fetus, and nobody else ought to have a say. That’s my position and I’m stickin’ to it.
And I think the bottom quote you posted is all we really need to know. He abused her, and he thought it was okay, and where the hell were her parents when she was covered in bruises to protect her from this monster? I’m glad he’s in jail, though I disagree with the charge, and I’m glad he won’t get a chance to hurt other women.
>>Radfem, we’re crossing comments here, but I wouldn’t ask you to eliminate coersion concerns from the discussion of repro rights. Sure, it complicates the debate, but I’m really not okay with men forcing women to terminate pregnancies, any more than I’m okay with men forcing women not to terminate them. Choice means the choice of the person whose body is attached to the fetus, and nobody else ought to have a say. That’s my position and I’m stickin’ to it.>>
In the specific context of deciding if and when women who are pregnant and say they want abortions should be allowed to obtain them, how can we protect women from this kind of abuse? All of the solutions that shield people from making hasty or coerced situations in other contexts–counselling, waiting periods, alternative education, informed consent–would restrict abortion and burden women who need them. They’re generally used by pro-lifers for that exact purpose–just like this law, in fact, which ostensibly protects women from battery. The spectre of forced terminations for coerced women and girls is usually brought up in the same context, the latest example being the “If You Don’t Vote For This Bill, You’re Supporting Child-Rapists” Bill.
I didn’t know about the articles, until I looked to see if there were any explanation for the bruises on her face, legs, etc. At one point, she said she bruised easily. I’ve heard women who have been abused say that before, so it struck a chord in me.
Her boyfriend struck her numerous times, on numerous occasions, how many and to what extent is not really known. It’s gotten lost in the larger debate that arose from the first implementation of the new Texas law. B/c this is really all about the fetus, whether it is a life or not. Whether it can be killed or not. The woman is the receptacle for the fetuses involved in the case, and the only interest in her is whether she caused their death(even if she’s not charged) based on what she said. Whether or not she’s a victim of abuse or not, is not going to be a major issue raised. She’s the one who possesses the uterus, which carried the fetuses in question.
Was she upset at his conviction? Did she support him? Did she continue to support him after the defense attorney basically demonized her to help his client? Yes she did. She loves him, according to her definition of what love is, which certainly at the very least, is unhealthy and immature(who knows what love is even in the best of circumstances at 16?). But loving a man who abuses you(again, based on the woman’s definition of love) is not unheard of in DV situations either. I’ve heard women fervently recant DV despite the evidence on the witness stand before, as well. And coersion in a relationship that has admitted physical abuse is always a possibility.
I don’t know the circumstances of what led to the miscarriage. I know what the stories are, and it seems that he was the first to confess to it. But I do know that if the relationship has DV involving either party to the other, or both, it clouds the issue of what happened.
It would be interesting to know if the jury issued any public comments on deliberations.
It raises questions, and I think it’s very possible to have these questions AND still think the Texas law stinks and should never, never have been applied in this case. This should never have been looked at as fetal death, but more closely examined as a DV case. That was a mistake. Both, because it is a slippery slope AND it puts the pro-choice movement and feminists in the role of supporting a man who has admitted DV against his girlfriend.
Thomas wrote:
“I don’t know whether you were winging a guess or you had read the other news out there, but your point that she was coerced might be spot-on.”
I had the same thought as Portia, just because I don’t think you could get a jury to slap a guy so hard, even in Texas, if they were convinced the girl was completely okay with it. Even if you had a whole jury made up of rabid pro-lifers (which seems unlikely), I can’t imagine they’d not consider punishing the boyfriend while letting the girl off, if the two were equally determined to abort, anything but unjust. Feminists going back to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have talked about how women are often coerced into abortion – no idea how common that is, but I have little doubt that it happens. And I suspect it most happens with teenaged girls.
I don’t have any problems with killing an unborn child being considered murder, but I have huge problems with the mandatory life sentence thing. But then I have huge problems with our penal justice system on a number of fronts…
Wow. It seems like this guy has been beating this gal for quite some time. Please ignore my previous comments (based on the limited news story) – this is in fact an abuse case, as Portia and others characterized it.
I think I’m going to almost write a book here.
First of all, this is not the same as murder. The reason for life sentences for murderers is to keep other people safe from them; to prevent them from harming someone else. If he had killed living, already-born children, it would have been murder and the court would be justified in passing a life sentence, to keep him from killing other children. However, if they were living children this never would have happened because there would be no REASON to kill them. The couple aborted the pregnancy because Erica did not want to be pregnant—ending the pregnancy was the issue here; the deaths of the fetuses were a side effect, as there was no way for them to have survived. There is no proof that the deaths of the fetuses had ANYTHING to do with either party wanting to kill the fetuses. Therefore, it is not murder.
BTW, the right to life, which I notice the prosecution has invoked here, does NOT include the right to live at someone else’s expense. To survive because someone’s body is supplying your oxygen and nutrients, is a PRIVILEGE, not a right. Anyone has a right to not have their self-sufficient existence interfered with, but no one can force one person to use their body to support someone else. Assuming fetuses, embryoes, and so forth are “people,” as the Right keeps insisting.
They need to change the law so that it only affects people who act AGAINST the mother’s wishes. It is her body; her decision should be paramount. Of course it’s Texas, so they won’t.
Now for the kicker: note above that the guy who performed the autopsy CAN’T DETERMINE WHO CAUSED THE DEATHS! That is what is known as a technicality. The worst thing they can legally charge him with is attempted murder, because they can’t say for sure that he is the one who killed them.
Was anyone able to prove that the fetuses had not died of natural causes before, and their corpses smashed up by “blunt force trauma?” It is unlikely, but it’s a possibility. Natural miscarriages happen.
As for the guy who said it would have been easier if the twins had already been born: well, yeah: this never would have happened. Unless Flores’ motivation really was a desire to kill children instead of to end the pregnancy, which we’ll never find out, will we?
It seems that abortion in general draws parallels to Texas’s Futile Care Law, compliments of George W. Bush, which basically allows for the removal of (artificial) life support from babies who are dependent on it, if the family can’t afford that life support. Abortion allows for the removal of life support (the mother’s body) from fetuses who are dependent on it, if the mother does not want to, or cannot, be pregnant. The termination of the fetus is the equivalent of euthanesia—it cannot survive, so it is killed instead of dying slowly on its own. It’s a strange quirk of conservative logic that they see no problem with causing the death of a child its family wants, but find plenty wrong with allowing a woman to stop supporting a fetus she doesn’t want. They find it a greater loss if government money is used to support life, than if a woman’s body is used against her will to support life. Sickening.
And the Texas Futile Care Law only comes into effect with living babies—various right-wingers have tried to insist that fetuses with fatal deformities be carried to term because “the mother should get a chance to hold her baby,” or some such stupidity. Like saying someone should drive across the country to buy a jug of milk. They don’t want to waste government money to keep a living child alive for months or years (in which time it could grow and possibly interact with people, depending on the reason for the life support), but they’ll happily force women to waste months of their lives on a pregnancy with no chance of success, for a few minutes of something many of them wouldn’t want, much less consider worth it. Particularly amusing (in an ironic, the-right-is-stupid, but incredibly scary and sad way) is the idea that some anti-choicers support a system that would force a woman to carry to term and give birth to a baby with a defect that requires life support, and then would remove that life support. “Mandatory, when it’s your load to carry, but once it’s ours, we’ll drop it.”
Getting back to the article (the update, specifically), whether it was a joint decision to abort or whether he forced the issue, is another thing we’ll never know. The fact that she stood with him instead of testifying against him, proves nothing, as that’s often an effect of abuse. If she’d testified that he coerced her and did it himself, that would also have proved nothing, as she could have been framing him, in response to the abuse. People have been known to lie under oath. But we don’t know if that’s the case either.
Finally, I think he does deserve the life sentence. For abuse.
Regarding the argument between a few commenters about whether consent is relevent in a case with abuse charges:
First of all, a couple of you are confusing “She asked for it” with “I gave permission for it.” As with abortion, it is the affected person who gets to make that call.
Secondly, I agree that this may not be sufficent. It is in S/M; however, an abuse victim can be coerced, and a coerced victim and a willing participant sound the same on the witness stand.
I recommend some kind of waiver, with DETAILED information about exactly what one consents to, that can be revoked easily. Not perfect, but then what is? Certainly not Texas.
I don’t know whether you were winging a guess or you had read the other news out there, but your point that she was coerced might be spot-on.
That’s actually the larger point I’m focusing on, but I appreciate both your graciousness and Radfem’s further posts on this, as they’ve really helped me find the point I was obtusely heading for:
My point has to do with what it means, the point we’re at, when the abusiveness is lost in the effort to uphold the sanctity of the womb’s contents. That’s a hell of a thing both to prosecute and then have progressives unknowingly defend. Because it means that progressive thought has been more than somewhat tangential to the real issues in front of us. We’ve bought the sleight-of-hand. We believe it’s more possible, maybe even probable, that the damage done to this woman’s womb is more important to us, more hateful to us than the damage that was done to her in the act of damaging her womb. And its potential contents.
More on “consent of abuse:” If my (hypothetical) boyfriend and I are both into martial arts, and are of similar skill, and practice with each other, and one of us gets a bruise, is the other guilty of abuse?
What if we both get bruises? Can somebody charge both of us with abuse?
I think abuse is when Person A does something to Person B in order to hurt, exploit, control, or otherwise harm Person B,
or,
When Person A does something Person B is hurt or harmed by, which Person B has a problem with it continuing, or is in danger (as determined by Person B or a professional evaluator).
Yes, I realize this has holes in it, but I’m not writing legislation here. This is the general idea.
The thing is, aside from intent, there is no set definition for abuse. that works in every case. What one person is unwilling to tolerate, another might find perfectly acceptable (for example, consentual S/M is not for everybody, but some people enjoy it). Also, people might tolerate something in some situations but not others (I have no problem walking out of a martial arts class with a bruise or two, but if a significant other causes one (not from that martial arts class), he (or she) is GONE, and probably in more pain than they caused me.)
The system of justice in this country was based on the theory that it was better for ten guilty people to be found innocent than for one innocent person to be found guilty. That is as it should be. Unfortunately, as has been mentioned, the law is subject to the interpretation of the people in power. People exist who would jail an S/M practitioner under domestic abuse laws and acquit a real abuser under the same laws, just as people exist who would use the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment to favor Christianity and the Establishment clause to refuse to protect the rights of Wiccans to freely exercise their beliefs. And people exist who quote “Thou shalt not kill” at abortion providers while wholeheartedly supporting the war in Iraq, and ignoring the genocide in Darfur. Like I said, the world isn’t perfect. And it’s imperfect enough without rewriting laws to prosecute the innocent. Especially if they don’t help prosecute the guilty.
I’m talking here about the definition of abuse in general, by the way, not about this particular case. The prosecuters in this particular case, however, didn’t seem to care. Too busy protecting the unborn, I guess. And you heard it from them: they wanted to get the mother too. So obviously they don’t give a damn whether she was abused or not. “She didn’t, couldn’t, or wasn’t able to stop it. She’s as guilty as he is” is what they’re thinking. Assholes.
Kyra said:
“It seems that abortion in general draws parallels to Texas’s Futile Care Law, compliments of George W. Bush, which basically allows for the removal of (artificial) life support from babies who are dependent on it, if the family can’t afford that life support. Abortion allows for the removal of life support (the mother’s body) from fetuses who are dependent on it, if the mother does not want to, or cannot, be pregnant. The termination of the fetus is the equivalent of euthanesia…it cannot survive, so it is killed instead of dying slowly on its own. It’s a strange quirk of conservative logic that they see no problem with causing the death of a child its family wants, but find plenty wrong with allowing a woman to stop supporting a fetus she doesn’t want. They find it a greater loss if government money is used to support life, than if a woman’s body is used against her will to support life. Sickening.”
Amp, is there any chance we could start a thread to discuss this issue? I’m thinking that the blatant hypocrisy demonstated by these two contradictory positions might actually be a good wedge issue that pro-choice people could use to our advantage. It certainly disproves the whole idea that the anti-abortion movement is about saving lives. Would anyone else be interested in discussing this in reference to how it could be used to shape pro-choice activism?
Portia said
“My point has to do with what it means, the point we’re at, when the abusiveness is lost in the effort to uphold the sanctity of the womb’s contents. That’s a hell of a thing both to prosecute and then have progressives unknowingly defend. Because it means that progressive thought has been more than somewhat tangential to the real issues in front of us. We’ve bought the sleight-of-hand. We believe it’s more possible, maybe even probable, that the damage done to this woman’s womb is more important to us, more hateful to us than the damage that was done to her in the act of damaging her womb. And its potential contents. ”
I think you hit the nail on the head right there. I have seen discussions of this case posted in several online forums, and have found it disturbing that so many feminists have gone out of their way to defend this guy. Why should we be so quick to believe that this girl really asked for what happened to her? Anyone with any knowledge of DV knows how often victims recant, which is why there are laws allowing police to prosecute them even in the absence of cooperation from the victim. Don’t get me wrong, I’m for abortion on demand, but I think that in any case involving a woman being beaten by her partner we should treat claims that she consented to it with extreme skepticism.
Just to clarify, I realise that everyone on this thread very quickly changed their position as soon as it became clear that there was previous abuse in the relationship. What alarmed me is that so many people accepted the “she asked him to do it” version of events in the first place. The whole situation seemed like one giant red flag to me right from the get-go. I’m curious as to why it didn’t set off more people’s DV radars.
That’s my take on it in a nutshell, BritGirlSF. Obviously, I’ve seen comments by people who are knowledgable about DV make the connection right away, but a lot of other people didn’t, and that worries me. We all honed right in on the dead babies: the pro-lifers say prosecute for murder, the pro-choicers say look at what these stupid kids were forced to do…but we’ve jumped right over all those, as you say, red flags surrounding the girl.
The reason we believe that she asked him to is that’s what she said, to be fair. Also, stories of women taking extreme measures to terminate unwanted pregnancies where abortion is illegal, or in the case of Texas de facto illegal, are so common.
Just to be clear from my comments yesterday — I don’t dispute the abuse; I dispute the cruel and unusual nature of his sentence.
Thanks for the answer, bean. I suppose I’m thinking more in terms of mandatory counselling, etc.
How would this system deal with a woman choosing to terminate a pregnancy because she is being abused, because she believes that it would intensify the abuse or make it more difficult to leave an abusive relationship?
bean, you raised some good questions early on, imo. Thanks for your posts on your experiences.
Portia, BritGirlSF, yeah, on your points. I think you explained them well.
I still am not sure what actually happened in this case. I’m not trying to say what she did or didn’t do, or what he did or didn’t do, it’s just too confusing to figure out what happened with DV involved in the relationship, to make any sort of decision. Even if she had asked him and meant it(not told or coerced to do it), did she do it out of desperation as was assumed or b/c she learned by that point in time that it was okay to be hit and punched by her boyfriend or perhaps a sign proving that he loved or cared about her?
The way, he said, yeah I hit her a few times to stop her from bothering me, disturbed me. It’s that the, oh I hit her…almost like it was a normal thing to him and perhaps it is. It’s not clear to me whether or not she ever collaborated his accounts of hitting her either. If she kept silent to protect him about that, then what is she doing now? Women do recant in DV or they deny abuse, for different reasons. They don’t admit it when they have bruises or injuries they are asked about. I’ve seen D.A.’s put their main witness, the victim, on the stand and just ask the questions, and the woman denies everything, so they are left with declaring their main witness, a hostile witness and they often continue by using the police report, or preliminary hearing transcript to impeach her testimony. In our county, there’s high turnover in that division, in the DA’s office and a supervising DA who used to work in it said that it’s frustrating to see women recant(but they know the dynamics which frustrates them more) but they still have to pursue the case without it, b/c of the high recanting rate for DV. That’s not to put heat on women who recant which wasn’t his intention, just a perspective of a very complex issue and I appreciated his honesty.
So many questions…I wish they had more on the actual case both sides presented. All I could find was stuff from the first two days. And the progression of the investigation which led to the D.A.’s charges to see where the political agenda first entered the picture. (i.e. were they looking for a “test case” for this new law?)
I’m not an expert on the issue at all. Most of the research I’ve read on it, pertains to DV by LE officers. I’ve talked with battered women, who have decided to go forward with cases and it’s not within a system supportive of them, as victims nor as women. But there’s still a lot to learn and to understand.
I do think that the DA’s office and LE did the wrong thing here, not looking into the DV and concentrating on the damage to the contents of the uterus and not the woman who it belonged to, as portia pointed out as being a problem for many parties even progressives in cases like these, which is an important point. If they’d done that, then the case wouldn’t have been a capital one with only two outcomes: lethal injection or life in prison w/ parole(if death is not requested, then this is the only possible sentence). It would have been a DV case and this “murdering the unborn” law would have not been in play.
If they take the case to the USSC, it will be interesting to see what happens there. I don’t know if a reversal will happen in Texas, as even their federal appellate district is the most conservative. I don’t see this guy doing anything remotely close to 40 years FWIW.
“Anyone who claims to be pro-choice really should be just as concerned about women being forced and/or coerced into having an abortion as they are about women not having access to abortion. And that concern should be taken seriously and not avoided or dismissed just because they think helping a woman not get an abortion is helping the pro-life side. ”
Word, bean.
A few parting thoughts (from a general practitioner) that you should take into your next debate the next time some sort of court case of interest is at issue:
People lie. They lie all the time. They lie about important things and unimportant things. They lie irrespective of race, gender, social class, or position of power. They lie if they are the group you support politically, and they lie if they are the group you oppose politically. They lie on the stand, and they lie to their lawyers.
And, invariably, they do not think they are doing anything wrong.
I see it every day.
An employee quits and goes to work for a competitor. The employer wants to sue for disloyalty. “I supported and trained and paid him for years, and this is how he repays me? This hurts me and my business more than if he defrauded me and stole thousands of dollars!” But there is no law against disloyalty and quitting. So the employer calls his lawyers and and says his employee defrauded him and stole thousands of dollars. Forges some documents to back it up, too. Happens all the time.
Two spouses are fighting over custody of the children. “Taking away my children would cause me greater pain than a physical assault.” But there’s no crime in trying to get custody. So the spouse calls the lawyer and says, “While we were married, he/she physically assaulted me.” They can even bruise themselves up. If they were trying to take your kids, wouldn’t you?
Man cheats on woman. Woman feels deeply violated, worse than if she had been raped, she thinks. But there’s no law against infidelity, so she calls her lawyer, and says that she was raped.
Does it all happen as often and it happens that the employee really steals, the spouse really abuses, and the man really rapes? Nope, not at all.
But it really happens. A lot. And they get on the stand and they sound really really credible.
And for someone interested in getting to the truth of the matter, it totally sucks, because lots of times you can’t tell whose story is more credible, and you fall back on your prejudices — which will either be “low paid employees lie” or “corporate suits lie” or “women lie a lot” or “men lie; women would never lie about something so important.” And whatever your pre-conceived notion you can find lots of examples, because the truth is that every group you can think of is filled with gobs or liars.
I’m a lawyer in a small town, so don’t have the luxury of “specializing” in just representing plaintiffs or defendants or employees or corporations. I represent people who have been discriminated against, and companies accused of discriminating. Men and women. The rich (at an hourly rate) and the poor (on contingency).
My number 1 job is to catch my clients’ lies before opposing counsel points them out for me. I’m definitely better at it than I was ten years ago, but I have found lies that my clients had told me months and years after I took the case, and I always kick myself.
So, it makes me cringe whenever I see it on the news or on blogs, and it’s based on an assumption that some party or other is telling the truth or lying. The truth is, their own lawyers probably don’t know who is telling the truth, so it’s always good advice to stop and think a little more than you otherwise would before basing any political arguments on the facts of any one court case.
What Richard said.
But that’s not the same as saying that consent is irrelevant. I will never accept that my wife’s consent is irrelevant.
Your analogy is off. This isn’t about the girl showing up with a bruise from consensual spanking. If the neighbor called the police and they burst in to find that your wife had cut your hand off, “but it’s consensual BDSM, I agreed to it” is not going to cut much ice with a prosecutor.
Terminating a pregnancy without a woman’s consent is an injury. I don’t think anybody here would disagree, whatever we may think about when life begins. The law recognizes an exception for women who voluntarily terminate a pregnancy with the help of a health-care practitioner.
That’s not just because we like doctors. It’s also because we don’t want situations like the way the news reports have described it, where an abusive partner can punch a woman in the stomach and say “Hey, it’s an abortion, she can say yes to it.”
Question for Amanda
I get your point that abortion is difficult to access in Texas. When I last lived there (in the late eighties) abortion was widely frowned upon but still avaliable, so I’m wondering what the current situation is actually like. When you say that it’s de-facto illegal (paraphrasing here) do you mean that it’s legal but with so many qualifications that in reality it’s extremely constricted, or that there just aren’t enough abortion providers around (like the Carolinas) so people have to go out of state to get an abortion, or that it’s legal but many people can’t afford it (or some combination of the above)? Is it a matter of which part of the state you’re in? I’m curious because I don’t remember abortion being nearly as big of an issue when I was there as it is now (I was in the Houston area). Of course part of that is a general shift that effects the whole country, which has tended to hit hardest in the south,but I haven’t lived in Texas for so long that there may be some other specific factors there that I’m not aware of.
Sorry to bug you for info. I can of course look up what laws are on the books, but what the law says and the way things actually play out on the ground are often very different, which is why is would be interesting to hear from someone who actually lives there.
Fellow pro-choicers:
Don’t touch this case with a ten-foot pole.
An 18 year old admitted abuser provokes a miscarrigae by beating his girlfriend who weeps and said it was what she wanted? Putting aside the fact that they could have had an abortion another way, and that it has DV victim issues written all over it, are you really going to stick up for a young man capable of beating and endangering his girlfriend’s life so much? Could you do that to your gfriend or daughter?
That said, Richard is right about the foolishness of ascribing our own perspectives to those involved in a case far away that we know about only very slightly. Jurors often tell the media after an unpopular verdict that if you weren’t there in the courtroom hearing what hey heard, you have no right to criticize their decision. Back off of this one, and go watch some trials at your local courthouse. It’s all way more complicated than you think.
But there’s no law against infidelity, so she calls her lawyer, and says that she was raped.
Nobody stomped on him for this stinker? Yeah, sure, Richard, funny how your hypothetical involved a woman lying about rape for revenge. Why didn’t you work a stereotype or two more in there?
Ginmar, is it your contention that no woman ever lied about rape for revenge?
>>An 18 year old admitted abuser provokes a miscarrigae by beating his girlfriend who weeps and said it was what she wanted? Putting aside the fact that they could have had an abortion another way, and that it has DV victim issues written all over it, are you really going to stick up for a young man capable of beating and endangering his girlfriend’s life so much? Could you do that to your gfriend or daughter>>
What? Um, no. Let’s get one thing straight here: there weren’t any other good options. She couldn’t just go out and get an abortion herself, privately, because that’s not legal in Texas. She apparently had good reason to believe–and so do we all–that neither the courts nor her parents would help her. She was sixteen, so she had very limited ability to travel to another jurisdiction, and would have become a statutory criminal had she attempted to do so. If her desire to get an abortion had been found out, her parents and law-enforcement officials would probably have prevented her from getting one in time. So she probably would have been absolutely terrified of talking to anyone or seeking out any help.
She couldn’t fucking well have got an abortion “another way.” Every circumstance in her life conspired to make inducing miscarriage through bodily harm a relatively viable option. You’re writing as though this is some new, horrible extremity, caused by an abusive situation, but it isn’t. It’s what pregnant women used to do, back when abortion wasn’t legal. And it’s what women will do in increasing numbers as abortion becomes less legal. Some of them will do it alone, and some of them will have help from family members, spouses, friends, and siblings. The abusive boyfriend didn’t need to be there for this to happen.
I don’t condone his abuse. I am not sticking up for him. But I am not going to act as though his abuse negates the hugely abusive treatment of this woman and her body by the law.
Ginmar, with all due respect, anyone like Richard who works in criminal law knows that people on occasion lie about being victims of rape and abuse. It is not invalid comment, and we should all hate the liars and not the messenger, since the few that lie cause major problems for the many that don’t.
Piny, I don’t support choice so that an 18 year old man can have a creative defense for abusing his girlfriend the way he did. They had options all along, as difficult as they may have been. Abortion is still not totally illegal in Texas and even if it were, he should have been convicted of felonious assault. I daresay that any reasonable person would conclude that it would be better to risk an unwanted pregnancy than jump on a 16 year old girl’s stomach, even if you thought those were the only two choices. He could have killed her. I have a soft spot for scared teenagers in trouble, but there’s no way I would support jumping on a woman’s stomach to induce abortion instead of going to her parents or a judge or just about anything else.
>>Piny, I don’t support choice so that an 18 year old man can have a creative defense for abusing his girlfriend the way he did.>>
Nice misdirection, there. That’s not why I’m complaining about this case, or about the, “Don’t touch this with a ten-foot pole” attitude you’re taking. I’m complaining because this kind of law further terrorizes women who seek abortions and people who provide them. It blurs the line between assault and abortion, redefining assault as trauma sufficient to cause a miscarriage, whatever the wishes or stated wishes of the woman involved. And it will have the added effect of making it more difficult for women who are injured by dangerous amateur abortions to seek medical help. It would be lazy to ignore the abuse aspect of this story, but it’s equally dangerous to ignore the potential implications for choice.
>>Abortion is still not totally illegal in Texas>>
It is impossible for a sixteen-year-old girl with no money, no information, no expectation of privacy, no reason to believe that the courts would take her side over her parents, and no reason to believe that she could notify her parents. If she had told anyone else, there’s a really good chance that she would have been forced to go through with the pregnancy.
>>and even if it were, he should have been convicted of felonious assault.>>
So even if a safe abortion weren’t an option, it still would be criminal for someone to seek out an unsafe one? Or criminal to assist someone with an unsafe one? What if a friend had procured a dangerous abortifacient for her? What if her older sister had agreed to hit her in the stomach? Would that have been assault? Would you have wanted to see either one of them in custody?
Piny, I don’t support choice so that an 18 year old man can have a creative defense for abusing his girlfriend the way he did.
I don’t think anyone here does, Elena, and it’s absurd of you to imply otherwise.
It’s been stated over and over again that the objection is to the fetal murder issue, which as this case has pointed out isn’t a slippery slope, but instead an effing landslide of destruction upon reproductive rights.
Point: Leave the fetus’s out of it, keep it to abuse – aggravated assault, hell if they think they can do it, attempted murder on the girlfriend, but don’t hijack the case to use as a tool in the fight against reproductive rights.
Pro-choicers should absolutely be making a statement on this one, and making it loud and clear. The case is about her choice, and the abuse that she suffered at his hands and getting to the truth of that matter. Not addressing it is a mistake of immense proportions, because this is one of those cases that will come back and bite us in the ass later if we brush it off.
I don’t understand why they couldn’t get an aboration. Is it ellegal in the State of Texas. I believe a womean have the right to do what ever she wants with her body, but her boy friend helped her comit a crime. I believe she should be trial too for killing the fetas. Why would be consent to being kick around because of an unwanted pregnancy. Did they not learn about sex education in school? Is something wrong with her mentally? That was known way to take lives, do it the legal way. Go have an aboration that is your rights.
In fact, I believe that a very very small number of women would ever lie about being raped.
I will randomly say that maybe 1% of women would ever lie about being raped. I don’t know, but usually at least 1% of any group of people will do all sorts of weird stuff.
But if 1% of women would lie about being raped, and, say, 20% of women have actually been raped, then 5% of reported rapes are false.
But that assumes that the 20% of women who are actually raped report it. Unfortunately, many women who are raped never report it or press charges. Obviously, these never go to trial. If half of the real rapes are never reported, then you have 10% of reported rapes being false.
Then, in many, many cases where there is a true rape and charges are pressed, there is lots of evidence and a pre-trial plea bargain is reached, so there is no trial.
Assume half of the true rapes are plea bargained so do not go to trial. Now, by the time we get to trial, the 1% of women who would falsely report a rape and responsible for 20% of the actual rape trials.
——————–
There is a rule of thumb in law is the law that 90% of all cases settle. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it certainly seems that at least 90% settle. The problem with outsiders looking at trials is that they think that those trials are representative of the larger world of cases that are filed.
They are most definitely not.
The cases that actually go to trial and are decided by a jury are the extreme outliers where the evidence is so mixed and inconclusive that the only way to get to the bottom of the case is to look at the two parties and decide which one is lying.
And yes, in that bizarre subset of cases that actually go to a jury trial, a not-insignificant percentage of the time, the party that you would never imagine would be lying is actually lying.
Oy-yay ey-vay. Forget the sexism. Your attempts at logic are offensive to me.
Maybe I made it more complicated than it had to be.
If a test for a disease has a 1% false positive rate, but only 1% of the population ever gets the disease, then even if you get a positive test result, there’s still only a 50% chance you have the disease.
That doesn’t mean that the test is wrong (“lying”) half of the time — just half of the time in the bizarre subset of cases (2% of the total) where there is a positive result.
Bean,
I was not trying to use actual statistical numbers — just it doesn’t require a belief that lots of people lie to reach the conclusion that lots of people are lying in trials.
I still don’t agree with fetal murder laws … but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a case of abuse. I may not agree that he should be charged with murder … but I’m sure as hell glad that he got charged with something (I’d have preferred assault or attempted murder).
And had he been charged with assault or some other crime against Erica, your point would be good, but in this case, he was charged not with that, but instead the Texas Prenatal Protection Act. While the crime may have been more weighted in regards to it being an abuse case than a choice case, it is absolutely clear that the intent of those pursuing the case were not as much concerned about the abuse as they were the method of abortion that may or may not have been at the behest of Erica Basoria.
Every case of abuse is important and matters, however, to shrug off the implications of a law that is absolutely being used as a slippery slope of getting abortion to be defined as murder as unimportant compared to the abuse or something pro-choicers should not touch is not the answer.
Uh, no. If a test has a 1% false positive rate, and you take the test and it comes out positive, then there’s a 99% chance that you have the disease.
If 1% of the population has a disease, and everyone in the world gets the test, then it is true that 50% of those with positive diagnoses are actually negative for the disease. But on the margin, for each individual test taker, it’s 99 and 1.
What I’m finding especially bizarre here is that the argument that the ends justify the means seems to be being used as a case to object to the ends not justifying the means:
* Gerardo Flores abused Erica Basoria until she aborted.
* Gerardo Flores is charged with 2 counts of murder and not abuse of Basoria, but that’s okay as long as her abuser is being punished.
Robert,
I think we are saying the same thing.
Mythago, are you saying that whether consent is a defense turns on the existence of permanent damage? I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but I’m not sure there is permanent damage here. I’m not sure there isn’t, either. I think we don’t know.
Of course, there was a risk of permanent damage, but that’s not the same thing. Lots of people consent to doing things all the time that risk permanent damage to themselves and others, like driving cars. Or driving race cars. Or mountaineering. Or martial arts.
(Since the fact of the abuse in this relationship came out, I’m no supporter of the kid and I have reason to believe that the woman was coerced to terminate the pregnancy. I’m not walking away from that. I’m just talking about the role of consent in risky behavior).
The admission of abuse in this relationship certainly changes the way we ought to view it, but I doubt it will be that long until the facts as Amp originally posted them recur. How long is it until two teens in a relationship where there is no reason to expect abuse try a DIY abortion in a state where abortion is unavailable to them legally or practically? And then, either the woman will die, or if the state is one with one of these rediculous fetal personhood statutes, the prosecutor will charge the boyfriend with killing the fetus, and we’ll be having the same conversation.
So, if the facts had been as they originally appeared (unwanted pregnancy, parental notification state, no local provider, DIY abortion by striking the abdomen, no evidence of abuse or coercion), would people still thing that this kid belonged in jail?
Richard, I’m sorry, but that is not how statistics work, and you and Robert are *not* saying the same thing. Robert’s explanation is a pretty good simplified explanation of how the equations actually work out.
I get your broader point about lying, but I think you could have made it without making such an inflammatory comment about rape, or misrepresenting statistics.
He’s not misrepresenting them, he just doesn’t get them. It’s OK, he’s a lawyer. If we ever get a lawyer who understands math, the human species will probably come to an end.
Since his point was that people lie about everything, specifically including things like rape, I think his example was reasonable.
If we ever get a lawyer who understands math, the human species will probably come to an end.
Actually, there is a strange subspecies of math-understanding lawyer. They tend to go into tax or patent law.
*shudder*
Mythago, are you saying that whether consent is a defense turns on the existence of permanent damage?
It doesn’t turn on that, but on what the law says (for example, ‘battery’ at common law is ‘unwanted’ and therefore it’s not battery if you wanted your wife to spank you). But aborting a fetus is indeed a permanent injury. The exception in the law is when the mother wanted to abort and when a health-care practitioner performed the abortion.
Hitting a pregnant woman hard enough to induce abortion sure can cause permanent damage.
Actually, there is a strange subspecies of math-understanding lawyer. They tend to go into tax or patent law…*shudder*
Finally, an area of consensus…these hideous creatures must be stopped before they destroy us all!
I agree with Kim that this is an issue that feminists must talk about. To me the two key issues about Texas law that this case brings up are:
1. It is entirely credible that a 16 year-old who was 16 weeks pregnant would not be able to get an abortion in Texas if they wanted one. Particularly if her parents were anti-abortion or she did not have much resources.
2. Legally his abuse of her was considered irrlevant. She was considered far less important than the fetuses. A man admitted hitting his girlfrield and he wasn’t charged, in fact the abused woman was blamed when he was charged. This is exactly why fetal protection laws are such a bad idea, they treat the women as if they don’t exist.
More importantly the reason people who are pro-choice should pay attention to this case is because Erica Basoria probably didn’t have any. She didn’t have a choice to have a legal, safe abortion, she may not have had the choice to bring the pregnancy to term, and she didn’t have a choice not to be abused by her boyfriend.
Mythago, at the risk of debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin:
I agree that “[h]itting a pregnant woman hard enough to induce abortion sure can cause permanent damage. ” Can, but may not. However, when you say, “aborting a fetus is indeed a permanent injury,” whether I agree depends on what you mean. If you mean injury in the legal sense, i.e. when I am deprived of a right or of property, I am injured thereby, then I agree with you. If you’re calling the loss of a pregnancy a _physical_ injury to the mother, rather than a deprivation of a right, I respectfully disagree. The fetus is of course injured, but that’s an entirely different matter.
Robert—“Is it your contention that no woman has ever lied about rape?”
That’s not what we’re discussing, though, is it? What Richard did was use something that happens rarely as an example of something common. He used a common and sexist stereotype to demonstrate a hypothetical–and he did it not once but twice. “Women lie about abuse to get what they want.”
And Elena, his status as a lawyer means absolutely nothing. I wasn’t aware that admittance to the bar also had the effect of purging one of sexism.
Sorry, but two out of three examples using one of the most damaging stereotypes of women there is? Women are believed to lie; men are believed to tell the truth.
If all people lie and there’s no harm, no foul, how come those two examples used such morally and culturally-loaded images of women? Hm, there’s all kinds of examples of women lying that don’t involve abuse or rape. None of them would have the history of those stereotypes.
Since his point was that people lie about everything, specifically including things like rape, I think his example was reasonable.
Since this is a feminist board and the huge problem with rape is people not believing that women tell the truth about it, the idea that the behavior of a rediculously minute percentage of women says more about women than the behavior of the majority is indeed, telling.
Richard could have come up with examples of women embezzling, shoplifting, committing all sorts of crimes. that involve deception.
I just read Richard’s original post, and it did not claim that “the behavior of a ridiculously minute percentage of women says more about women than the behavior of the majority.” He specifically said that false accusations aren’t as common as true rape reports.
And because this is a board that discusses feminist issues a lot, I think we should be able to discuss all aspects of rape – including the fact that some women and men do lie about being raped. I’m worried that there’s a tendency for some topics to feel “forbidden,” even if they aren’t explicitly forbidden.
On the other hand, it’s kind of off-topic for this thread; this post may be a better place to discuss false rape reports. (Not that I’m really opposed to thread drift.)
Oh, sure, there’s a place for discussing false rape reports. But when two out of three examples are of women using tales of abuse to get their way, I have to wonder why if it’s merely untruthfulness that’s being discussed, why it was necessary to pick those sexually-charged images of women. It’s never necessary to casually toss in examples of sexually duplicitous men, somehow.
It is entirely credible that a 16 year-old who was 16 weeks pregnant would not be able to get an abortion in Texas if they wanted one. Particularly if her parents were anti-abortion or she did not have much resources.
Sure. Is it known that Erica Basoria did not actually have access to abortion?
Thomas, I did not say abortion is an injury. I said that terminating a pregnancy without a woman’s consent is an injury, definitely in the legal sense, possibly in the physical sense. Punching a woman in the stomach is not a safe or sane way to terminate a pregancy.
It’s never necessary to casually toss in examples of sexually duplicitous men, somehow.
And yet Richard did.
Mythago, I agree it’s not safe to try to terminate a pregnancy by striking the pregnant woman’s abdomen. In fact, I think it is likely to happen in only two circumstances: (1) where a pregnant woman does not have, or does not believe she has, recourse to safe, legal, accessible abortion; or (2) abuse. From what Amp originally posted, I thought this case was the former, but it now appears quite clearly to be the latter. Cases of DIY abortion will become increasingly common in a nation where the right to choose is increasingly theoretical, however. I’m not about to condemn kids for their attempts to do by themselves unsafely what they should be able to do medically and safely.
On the question of injury, I agree that terminating a pregnancy without the woman’s consent is an injury, and one that ought to be actionable. I’m not willing to call it a physical injury to the woman.
Oh, come on, Robert. The whole point of the ‘man cheats on wife’ thing isn’t the hubbie, it’s the wife claiming she was raped. Your next step will be to claim that fair’s fair because he used a neutral ‘spouse’. Of course we know how evenly balanced in gender are victims of domestic violence. Actually, that’s something else that’s annoying—-treating domestic violence like it happens equally. So, yeah, what’s up wiht that?
I agree that domestic violence does not occur evenly. Men abused by women in marriage are verrrrrrrrrrrrrry rare, especially compared to women abused by men (add more “r”s if you like and can justify it with statistics.) I bet more men falsely claim abuse in a divorce case than actually are actually abused (especially in New Jersey, which does not have “no fault,” but that’s a different story.)
But in the (again, rare) case where it does happen, it is disproportionately likely to end up in divorce court for a custody hearing.
And the judge can’t look at statistics. He’s got to look at the woman (“He hit me!”) and the man (“She hit me!”), compare bruises and scars, and decide who is telling the truth and who is lying, or if they are both lying or both telling the truth (in which case the kids may go to a foster home).
Sometimes, the judge makes the wrong call, and bad people get the kids, or get away with rape.
But I bet the judge does a whole lot better than the voters in the insta-polls who have only read newspaper accounts.
I am only warning against defending or opposing a policy through reference to any one case, be it this one, or Kobe Bryant’s rape case, or Bridget Marks’s custody case, or whatever. Don’t create martyrs, or representative of “people like us everywhere”, because people who make the news in any capacity tend to be extreme outliers on whatever scale you’ve got.
So it’s an outrage that Richard doesn’t throw in examples of sexually duplicitous men, and when its pointed out that he does, you start channeling John Edwards to figure out my next response, which you then presumptively find outrageous because he used gender-neutral language instead of genderizing the language to ignore the experience of the small, but real, group of men who get spousally abused.
If Richard does genderize his examples, you’re pissed off because he’s being a sexist. If he doesn’t genderize his examples, you’re pissed off because he’s misrepresenting reality. Short of discussing the weather, is there anything that Richard – or anyone, for that matter – who doesn’t agree with you on every single thing can do to be able to have a conversation with you in which you don’t get pissed off?
Erm, guys? Richard Bellamy is being pretty darn reasonable, and his use of statistics is correct. He sounds very superficially like those MRA types who accuse all women of being conniving, lying cheats, but the resemblance is only superficial, and you should be directing your ire more correctly. His point is just that people lie on the witness stand, including some women making rape accusations. He’s explicitly said
which in conjunction with his claim that
suggests that he’s more credulous regarding most rape claims than he is regarding most other claims. (Which seems reasonable, given the cost associated with making a rape claim..)
The “false positive” example is one that my (physician) mother used when explaining some basic statistical concepts to me when I was a kid. It’s a pretty stock example, I think. Robert and Richard are not saying the same thing, and I can’t find any sense in which Robert’s statement comes out true. There’s a sense in which you have at least 1% chance of having the disease (before the results come in, at least 1% of people in your situation have it) and there’s a sense in which you have a 50% chance of having the disease (after you get the positive result, 50% of people in your situation have it). But there’s no way of describing your situation such that 99% of people in your situation have the disease, and only 1% don’t.
If there’s a 1% false negative rate, and you have the disease, then there’s a sense in which you have a 1% chance of testing negative. But that’s not the same as a 1% chance of being disease-free, since the disease and the test don’t match up perfectly.
So yeah. I’m as annoyed by the crazy “women are liars” contingent as the rest of you, but stop dumping on Richard.
People who believe that women lie all the time are the ones creating the martyrs, Richard.
But I bet the judge does a whole lot better than the voters in the insta-polls who have only read newspaper accounts.
You should follow your own advice. And it would help if you’d stop giving advice as if I were following the Feminist Handbook or something. Still Unequal by Dusky details exactly how uneven and unjust is the treatment of women in law, with the injustice most aptly demonstrated by people dismissing truthful rape victims as liars. A Woman Scorned also has a great deal to say about the law and its biases against women.
What we really need to do is be aware of sexual and sexist stereotypes of women and then consciously not use them. How hard is that? Evidently quite hard, because you used two of them.
Oh, come on Robert. Like you’ve missed all those discussions where men invade some feminist discussions with their protestations of, “But not all men are like that!” when a minority of men were under discussion. While it’s perfectly apparent that a minority of men are under discussion, they get defensive. Yet here you are, advocating for the equal treatment of unequals—including male domestic violence victims—–while bitching at me for demanding equal treatment of equals.
Using two examples that featured one sexual stereotype of women and one disingenuous neutral is neither equal nor fair. That’s two out of three, when women commit far fewer crimes than men do. Using ‘spouse’ for a crime that we all know is committed far more often on women by men than vice versa is exactly the sort of deceptive language someone was talking about earlier, where women get abused by ‘the violent home.’
Yes, let’s call them gender-neutral terms, why don’t we? Because that obscures the truth far better than relying on phrases like ‘the violent home’ or ‘the violence.’ Not only does it make the offender disappear but it also makes the victim disappear, only to have them turn up disproportionately represented in ‘fair’ anecdotes.
So yeah. I’m as annoyed by the crazy “women are liars”? contingent as the rest of you, but stop dumping on Richard.
Assuming his statistics are correct, which is not something I’m going to comment on till I look at them further, when someone chooses the 1% as an example over the 99% rule, it sends a message.
I commented somewhere on how some men are so very very eager to have men included in the victims crying equality, when the proportions are unequal: 1/99, for example. Yet they’re also very eager to have their identity amidst the offenders obscured: 99/1, for another example. This is a perfect example.
There’s some conflation of prospective and retrospective odds going on.
1% of the population has Creeping Toe Fungus, an invisible and mostly undetectable syndrome. A test is available for the syndrome. The test has a 1% false positive rate and no false negatives.
A random sampling of 1,000,000 members of the population take the CTF test. 10,000 people get correct positive results. 10,000 people get incorrectly positive results. So of the pool of people who got positive test results, half of the positives are wrong.
But if you, John Smith, go in for the test, and you actually have CTF, you don’t have a fifty percent chance of getting a wrong answer. You have a 100% chance of getting the right answer, because there are no false negatives.
If you do not have CTF, and you go in for the test, you don’t have a fifty percent chance of getting a wrong answer. You have a 1% chance of getting a wrong answer – a false positive. 99% of the time you will get the right answer, that you’re clear.
The retrospective experience of an arbitrary group of testees doesn’t statistically control the outcome of a new test. Nobody prospectively has a 50-50 chance of a wrong diagnosis.
Robert, everything you’ve just written is true, but I think this earlier comment must’ve been a mistake.
If a test has a 1% false positive rate, and you take the test and it comes out positive, then there’s a 99% chance that you have the disease.
Also, I never said that either fungus suffers or non-fungus-sufferers had a 50% chance of misdiagnosis. The claim I should have made was something like this: given that I’ve just gotten a positive test result back, the correct odds for me at which to bet that I’ve got CTF are 50/50. Analogously in Richard’s example, given that a case has made it to trial, we should be betting that the prosecutor is lying at 20/80 odds. That’s what I mean by the claim that there’s a 50% chance that I’ve got a false positive, once I’ve gotten some sort of positive.
Of course, I’m assuming a subjectivist or frequentist model of probabilities, rather than a realist model. Maybe that’s where the disagreement is coming from. For the rape-trial purposes, the subjectivist or frequentist model seems like the most appropriate one, since what’s relevant is whether X counts for evidence of Y, and not whether X causes Y.
Yet men’s rights advocates or whoever stil use neutral terms for male attackers, overuse examples of female perfidy when they form a 1% proportion of attackers, and switch to theoreticals when we know what we’re dealing with are people and their real world rates of offending.
Strange, huh?
And people wonder why nobody cottoned onto the fact that this girl was being abused right off the bat.
“The claim I should’ve made was something like” — bleh! “The claim I did make, should perhaps have been phrased,” is closer what I meant. Amp, is there any chance you could bring back the preview button? It’s my major protection against sounding like a total jackass (although it’s not always 100% effective.)
Also — Creeping Toenail Fungus? Very cute example; sort of goes with my screenname, too :-)
Didn’t even see that, Jenny!
And I agree, bring back the preview. Sure, it crashes the blog, but really that just gives Amp something to do.
I’m not even sure if that’s the one that crashed the blog or not. Almost certainly not; it’s just some javascript. (It may have been a link from Atrios that crashed the blog. Or something else. I dunno.)
I want to get permission from the server people before I begin bringing the plug-ins back. Some sort of preview – either the live preview we had, or a preview button – is very high on the agenda.
That’s why I coded BNN myself; if something crashes, I want to know where and why, which I can’t do with a commercial package.
(And then I know which women to blame for it. If it’s a database issue, I blame feminists. If it’s a formatting problem within a news story, I blame lesbians. )
“What I’m finding especially bizarre here is that the argument that the ends justify the means seems to be being used as a case to object to the ends not justifying the means:
* Gerardo Flores abused Erica Basoria until she aborted.
* Gerardo Flores is charged with 2 counts of murder and not abuse of Basoria, but that’s okay as long as her abuser is being punished. ”
Well, I disagree with this. I think that Flores should have been investigated and potentially prosecuted for DV, not under the “murdering the unborn” law. Even though I don’t think he’ll come close to serving a life sentence, still to try him under the law was wrong. Plus, as someone here said, laws like these render the women who possess the uteri invisibile or irrevelent. But then we’re treated as such often, regardless of the idelogy. We’re the means to the end.
What I found bizarre is that someone actually defined jumping on a woman’s abdoman or punching it, as a half-ass medical technique or something like that. I’m still a bit thrown off by that argument.
Radfem, Amen to your first two paragraphs.
I think the “half-assed medical procedure” remark was mine somewhere up the thread, or if not, the sentiment was. I want to make clear that I was referring to the facts and I initially understood them, i.e. a consensual decision to attack fetuses which were using a woman’s body against her will. Those are no longer what I understand the facts to be.
But, taking hypothetically the facts as laid out in Amp’s original post (woman wants to terminate and can’t or believes she can’t access abortion services legally, and so engages another person to terminate by a DIY method), I think it is proper to characterize the method, however crude or dangerous, as a “half-assed medical procedure.” I’m not limiting this to terminating a pregnancy — I think it is also fair to call Aron Ralston’s self-amputation (for those who don’t recall, he was canyoneering when a boulder trapped his arm) as a half-assed medical procedure.
I do really feel a little dumb that I uncritically accepted the first article’s take on what happened. But I think I accepted it because these kind of desperation measures are what I expect in the future as abortion becomes a mostly theoretical right for the young, the poor and the rural in this country. While this is a case of abuse by the boyfriend, how long is it before we see a botched DIY abortion where there is no abuse between the teens, and the abuser is one of the parents in a parental consent state? What happens if she is harmed? Will he go to jail, even over her objections? If that happens, how will we as feminists feel about a boy who tries to facilitate the right she ought to have by law, though they both endanger her by doing so?
(what I’m trying to say is that, as the facts turned out, they are depressing but not terribly interesting. I think many of us share the view that the boy ought to go to jail for DV, and for terminating a pregnancy against her will, but not for some crime against a fetus. The facts as they appeared when Amp first posted raised more interesting issues — what do you do with a kid who is trying to help his girlfriend do what most of us think she has a right to do, but endangers her or harms her in the process?)
Radfem;
I agree. That’s exactly my point though, this case should get scrutiny on all levels. Erica Basoria is treated as a non-entity within the whole ordeal, despite it being her body that was abused into aborting. She was simply a damaged incubator.
Kim- just agreeing with you that you’re right, it wasn’t about a defense for abuse, but I guess I was badly trying to make a point that it could very well be used as one, like that silly law in Florida allowing people who feel threatened to use firearms instead of making a reasonable attempt to get away.
What bothers me is that this nuanced issue of trying to decide which crime to charge this man with puts pro-choicers in a terrible position of trying to rationalize what that young man did, which has no excuse. I don’t like the way he was charged nor do I like the life sentence but what he did was terrible and violent and wrong. It reminds me of those who want to protect teenage girls who secretly have babies and then throw them in dumpsters. It’s misplaced. I wouldn’t object to new laws dealing with violent and dangerous abortion methods that demonstrate a willfull disregard for the mother’s life and wellbeing or something to denote the special awfulness of jumping on a woman’s stomach to bring about a miscarriage.