If Welden got the drug from his father’s office (his father’s a doctor) or from a pharmacy by using his father’s prescription pad, doesn’t that count as theft, as well? (Although Welden’s father doesn’t sound as if he’d press charges, if the drug came from a pharmacy, the company might feel differently.)
Please don’t make such a assumption, I was commenting on a above post, I was not stating my personal viewpoint.
Seems to me that assault, with aggravating factors (namely, the fraudulent administration of a drug to cause harm), would be appropriate.
In my opinion, the impact of the assault on the victim should be a significant factor in the sentencing - that is, where the woman wanted to have the kid, the judge should take that into account, and judge the severity of the crime accordingly. It is not “murder” - the victim here is the woman, not the fetus.
Sorry, I should have been more specific - substitute “father” and “mother” for “man” and “woman” in my post.
Exactly. If the mother can decide to end a fetus’ life without legal consequences, I don’t see how it can be murder when the father does the same thing.
See post 24, you are the one mistaken, the intent of the post was mother and father, not man and woman and it was clarified there.
As a huge abortion proponent, I think the guy should be charged with assault on her body at the very least. I don’t agree with murder, I don’t consider anything growing in a person prior to birth to be human enough to deserve any human rights at all whatsoever. But I do believe in personal body autonomy and this guy violated the woman’s.
I agree with this completely. I tried explaining this to my teacher in my high school political science class when we were discussing hypothetical murder charges against a random person who attacked a pregnant woman and my teacher called me “anti woman.”
I think that jail time and an assault charge makes sense, but not a murder charge. How can a fetus be a person in one instance but not in another?
How can light be a particle in one instance and a wave in another, and that depends on what you are testing for?
No seriously - why not? So as long as it is defined when what applies.
I’m glad they dropped the murder charge (y’all did notice that they dropped that, yes?) for the reasons already articulated. I don’t support ANY legislation or verdicts which make believe that a fetus is a person with the rights of a person, simply because it’s an admitted wedge used by anti-abortion legislators that I want no part of.
But assault/aggravated assault/poisoning, something in that nature? Sure. And it also looks like we’d have some practicing medicine without a license, forgery (if he signed his father’s name to the prescription) and…hell, let’s add insurance fraud to the pile as well, if her insurance paid for medication for a medical condition she didn’t have (Cytotec is not FDA approved as an abortion pill; it’s approved for preventing stomach ulcers in those taking lots NSAIDS). I’m all for heaping as much unpleasantness, fines and jail time as possible on this asshole; I just don’t think he murdered a person.
As a 100% pro-choice proponent, I’m not sure I have a problem calling the intentional killing of a wanted fetus “murder”. It’s the woman’s choice whether or not to have the child. But once she’s decided to have it, it seems like it’s deserving of legal protection. Maybe call it something else (aggravated manslaughter or something), so that it doesn’t warrant the same punishment as murdering a non-fetal human, but it’s definitely a serious criminal offense.
Everyone I think agrees that it’s rightfully a serious crime.
The nature of the crime, however, is up for debate. Specifically, who is the victim?
In my opinion, the victim in this circumstance is the woman. Aside from the inherent criminality of administering any drug to someone without their consent (and the damage done to her by way of suffering from the miscarriage), what she has suffered is the deprivation of her choice, and it is that right - her right, to choice and bodily integrity - that ought to be subject to legal protection.
Making the fetus subject to protection seems to me to be incoherent.
Attempted murder of the pregnant woman. How did he know the drug wouldn’t kill her?
Since he is not a doctor, impersonating a physician.
Doesn’t attempted murder require an intent to murder, though? Mens rea, or something? He didn’t intend to kill her.
This seems like a malleable standard. What if there is a particularly fickle pregnant woman who changes her mind between birth and abortion several times per day. Does the fetus/unborn child gain and lose rights with each conflicting thought the woman has?
What if this woman had decided 10 minutes prior to the man giving her the pill that she actually wanted an abortion (the legal kind in a clinic)? Should the charges he faces be different?
Many people would consider her deprivation of choice nulified by the deprivation of choice available to the man in the case. Her right to bodily integrity ends where someone else’s bank account begins.
Personhood is granted by the reality of biology, not the whims of another person.
adaher I believe that and you believe that, but legal consistency is less important to me than punishing a serious crime. I’d prefer that both elective abortion and what we can call ‘feticide’ (I.e. Killing someone’s fetus / embryo without their consent) be treated as homicide, but I’d prefer adequately punishing one of those two actions rather than neither. For the same reason, I’m not in favour of allowing men to dodge child support by saying they deserve a choice too.
There was a Forensic Files case maybe ten years ago (?Florida) where a physician tried to induce a miscarriage by secretly adding a medication to his girlfriend’s food/drink (she got suspicious, set up a videocamera in the kitchen and got him on tape doing the tampering). He was sentenced to some jail time and lost his medical license.
Was the pill was a deadly weapon, or did serious bodily injury?
A fetus isn’t a person so it can’t be murder. Aggrivated assault sounds good, on top of/in addition to any laws he broke with regards to performing an illegal abortion.