Elinda wrote:
Really, you should take gjabi's advice and read the bill. It goes on....
Quote:
(3) A person is not guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child if the sole reason
69 for the death of the unborn child is that the person:
70 (a) refused to consent to:
71 (i) medical treatment; or
72 (ii) a cesarean section; or
73 (b) failed to follow medical advice.
74 (4) A woman is not guilty of criminal homicide of her own unborn child if the death of
75 her unborn child:
76 (a) is caused by a criminally negligent act of the woman; and
77 (b) is not caused by an intentional, knowing, or reckless act of the woman.
Seems the purpose of the bill is pretty clear. Trying to distort that purpose by but imaginary meaning between the lines isn't really helpful to the cause (whatever that may be).
Try reading again. It says the exact think I said it says. Specifically:
Quote:
74 (4) A woman is not guilty of criminal homicide of her own unborn child if the death of
75 her unborn child:
<snip>
77 (b) is not caused by an intentional, knowing, or reckless act of the woman.
See those bolded and underlined words? Therein lies the boondoggle. To put it all in a single sentence:
"A woman is
NOT guilty of the cause of the child's death was
NOT intentional, knowing
OR reckless."
See the double negative there? That's one problem. The "or" is the other.
A double negative makes a positive. Therefore what this bill is actually saying is:
"A woman
is guilty if the cause of the child's death was intentional, knowing
or reckless."
In other words:
If the cause of the child's death is intentional or knowing, she's guilty,
OR (there's that word again) if the cause of the child's death was reckless, she's guilty. It doesn't have to be all of the above. It doesn't have to be both intentional AND reckless, it can be one or the other.
If the cause of the child's death is determined to be a reckless act (whether or not it was undertaken intentionally or knowingly) then she may be found guilty.
This means that any accident can be determined to be homicide of the fetus if the woman happened to be doing something deemed "reckless" (a very value-laden word in and of itself) around the time of a miscarriage.
Since there may not be any medical way to determine the cause of death of the fetus, this is basically subject to building circumstantial cases against women who happen to have lost a pregnancy while having a lifestyle or undertaking an activity deemed "reckless" by far-from-impartial investigators.
Let's follow the skiing example, since I've already used that a number of times. A woman suffers a placental abruption subsequent to skiing. Did the skiing cause the abruption? Or did she have a previously undiagnosed subchorionic hematoma that developed into an abruption? There would be no medical way to tell, but with the wrong doctor, the wrong investigator, the woman could find herself being prosecuted, if not actually convicted.
As the bill is worded, this circumstance is ENTIRELY possible. It allows investigators leeway to make value-judgments about the lifestyle and activities of women and then hold women criminally accountable for the accidental loss of a pregnancy if they decide they don't like the way the woman lived or what she was doing.
You may not like it, but that is exactly what the bill says when the language is dissected. I'm actually reading the bill much more closely than you or Gbaji are if I am seeing this and you are not. Maybe YOU should read the thing.
Has it yet been put to pen that the devil is in the details?
Edited, Feb 25th 2010 10:52am by Ambrya 
