Los Angeles Man Charged With "Murder" of "Unborn Baby"
Well, this unfolding story is tragic and curious. From the Los Angeles Times, yesterday:
A 37-year-old man was booked early this morning on suspicion of murder in the death of an unborn child believed to be his, Los Angeles police said.
Joshua Woodward, whom police described as a businessman with "ties to Chicago and Miami," was taken into custody by homicide detectives about 3:15 a.m. today.... He was booked... and is being held in lieu of $2 million bail, police said.
Woodward's arrest followed an investigation of "the suspicious circumstances of a miscarriage" reported Oct. 19, around the 13th week of gestation, police said. They released no other details....
Most interesting is phraseology. S/he is an "unborn child" when the mother wants him/her but "fetus" when she doesn't. And it's "murder" when the mother doesn't want her "unborn child" killed and "abortion" when she wants her "fetus" killed.
Searching for any liberal blog opinion on this story, I came upon the following entertaining (if I can use that word related to this topic) YouTube video in a post by RAMZPAUL....
I'm not sure if this guy is for real or if this is schtick. I think it's the former. But he actually nails the reason for the dichotomy. Warning, a little bit of coarse language...
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The article seems to try to pull a gotcha with the use of semantics, but there isn't a contradiction here at all really. Any contradiction viewed is arbitrary since what we attribute to whom about the right to terminate another is, at its core, just an arbitrary decision.
From a legal perspective, there is no contradiction. Attributing some rights to a fetus under certain circumstances is not outside the governments control. For example, animals do not have constitutional rights and yet cruelty against them is illegal in almost every state (it may be all of them but I'm too lazy to look). What the laws do is attribute some rights to a fetus, while preserving what the court viewed as a greater constitutional right, the right of the mother to terminate their fetus. Just like my case of animals, while an animal has some rights they do not hold the same rights as a person. The right to terminate a fetus is one only attributed to the mother, a criminal committing a crime cannot make that decision. The courts have essentially said that a mother can terminate that future person (I'm using person in the legal sense before anyone argues with me on morality grounds for the use of future), that right has not been attributed to anyone else. Because a criminal does not have that right, it is an unlawful termination and hence can be charged as some form of " homicide " regardless of what you call it. For example, the overwhelming majority of states no longer hold criminal punishments for the case of suicide (some crazy places still hold it as common law which I think is garbage). Most people agree that because that person is their own, they have the right to terminate their own life without legal repercussions. This does not mean that murder should also be legal because self-termination is not a crime. We have merely decided that we accept that self-termination should be criminalized, that does not mean we approve of the termination of life under any and all circumstances. I, as a pet owner, have the right to terminate my dogs' life if they are suffering from a great deal of pain and illness (and I have), yet my neighbor does not have the right to come over and kill my dog because he feels like it.
You can argue about whether anyone should have the right to terminate anyone (or thing) but yourself legally (I hope nobody feels suicide should be criminalized), but there isn't some massive contradiction in place like this article likes to argue since, at the end of the day, all of this discussion is just arbitrary.
Shouldn't it be "preforming a medical procedure without a license"?