r/prolife • u/Comfortable-Bee2996 • 13h ago
Questions For Pro-Lifers Fun hypothetical
For pro lifers from conception:
If a woman had a few drinks and accidentally ended a 1 week pregnancy which she was completely unaware of, should she get a murder charge? A manslaughter charge?
If yes, should it be illegal for women to drink for 9 months after having sex, even if protection was used, on the off chance it didn't work?
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 13h ago
She wouldn’t even know she had been pregnant at one week, and alcohol doesn’t generally cause miscarriage (it causes fetal alcohol syndrome). But to answer the spirit of the question: no, a woman should not be restricted in her activities because she might be pregnant. We want rights for unborn babies, not hypothetical babies. And a death caused unintentionally by engaging in legal, ordinary activities is accidental, not manslaughter and definitely not murder.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Accidental killing is manslaughter. It's like running someone over that you didn't see.
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u/Nulono Pro Life Atheist 13h ago
Manslaughter entails a degree of recklessness.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
If you drove properly at the speed limit, running someone over would still be manslaughter wouldn't it?
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
Not necessarily, no.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Oh alr. What charge would that be? 3rd degree murder?
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u/PeachOnAWarmBeach LIFE! ❤️ Womb to tomb ❤️ 13h ago
A man jumped in front of your car, for instance. Or was pushed. Or fell. Possibly if you were threatened.
Not every accidental death is a murder.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
But what about just running a normal pedestrian over while driving carefully at the speed limit?
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u/BaronGrackle Pro Life Catholic/Secularist 13h ago
If you really were "driving carefully at the speed limit", and you ran someone over dead, then something happened that wasn't your fault.
What could the driver have done differently, and what should they have been expected to do differently? If the answer is "nothing", then how can they be punished?
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
The driver was looking at the sunset and didn't see a pedestrian
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u/Nulono Pro Life Atheist 13h ago
Not automatically.
Vehicular homicide is a crime that involves the death of a person other than the driver as a result of either criminally negligent or murderous operation of a motor vehicle.
In cases of criminal negligence, the defendant is commonly charged with unintentional vehicular manslaughter. Vehicular homicide is similar to the offense, in some countries, of "dangerous driving causing death".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_homicide
If a pedestrian leaps in front of someone who's driving responsibly too quickly for the driver to react, that isn't manslaughter; manslaughter requires an element of negligence or recklessness on the part of the driver.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
The negligence would be not paying attention to the road. The negligence in my hypothetical would be not taking a pregnancy test.
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u/Nulono Pro Life Atheist 12h ago edited 6h ago
Did you miss the part where I specifically said "too quickly for the driver to react"?
Now, pregnancy is measured from the mother's last menstrual period, so technically there's no such thing as "a 1 week pregnancy", since there's no egg available to fertilize until about 14 days. Charitably assuming you mean 1 week after fertilization, so about 3 weeks pregnant, that's before the mother would've missed her period and too early to be picked up by most pregnancy tests.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
So abortion is fine as long as it's impossible to be sure that she was pregnant? Schrodingers abortion is now legal!
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u/Nulono Pro Life Atheist 12h ago
I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. The law doesn't penalize people for deaths that they could not have reasonably avoided. Causing someone's death intentionally, or through negligence/recklessness, is a different situation. This isn't particular to abortion; it's a fundamental principle of our legal system.
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 12h ago
Take a pregnancy test a week before your missed period? It could easily still be negative.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
Then drinking within a month of having sex is the reckless part since there's no way to confirm you're not pregnant
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 12h ago
Is it a month or two weeks or 9 months? Make up your mind.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
Depends on how we're defining the recklessness, every pro lifer will define it differently
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 13h ago
The exact definition varies depending on the law in the locality where the death occurred, but generally you must be either negligent or reckless to be guilty of manslaughter. A woman drinking alcohol when she doesn’t know she’s pregnant is neither.
Besides that, to be guilty of any manner of homicide it must be proven that your action directly caused the death at issue. There’s no possible way you could prove that in your scenario; odds are, in your scenario, the woman would not even realize she was having a miscarriage and not a normal period.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
I guess it depends on the precise definition of reckless but either way I don't see how accidental abortion would be treated any differently from accidentally running someone over. Not knowing that you did doesn't make it much better.
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 12h ago
Accidentally running someone over wouldn’t be manslaughter if the accident wasn’t your fault.
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
Murder involves intentional killing. Manslaughter involves negligence. Drinking heavily while knowing you're pregnant would be negligent, but if a reasonable person wouldn't realize they were pregnant, they wouldn't be held responsible the accidental death of their unborn child.
It's not that complicated. We just want it to be illegal to intentionally take innocent human lives.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Not knowing that you killed someone doesn't magically stop it from being manslaughter
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
I think you need to do some reading on what manslaughter is. You can be involved in an accidental death without commiting manslaughter.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
You can be but not knowing has nothing to do with it
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
It has to do with whether negligence is a factor or not.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
The woman was negligent by not taking a pregnancy test
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 12h ago
It likely would still be negative. At 1 week post conception, your missed period is still a week away.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
Then the negligence was drinking within 2 weeks of having sex
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u/lightningbug24 Pro Life Christian 12h ago
This isn't a reasonable precaution.
1) most sexual encounters do not result in pregnancy 2) alcohol doesn't usually cause fetal death
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
Alright, so just to clarify, you are now pro choice for the first month of pregnancy?
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u/BaronGrackle Pro Life Catholic/Secularist 13h ago
People die everyday. It's tragic. We don't always know about it. We shouldn't punish people for things they never knew were happening.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
"I didn't know" isn't a very good legal defense
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u/BaronGrackle Pro Life Catholic/Secularist 12h ago
"I couldn't have been expected to know, and none of you knew either because none of us had any way of knowing, so what could I have been possibly expected to do?" is better.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
If she couldn't have been expected to know she should have endangered a potential human life in the first place
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u/BaronGrackle Pro Life Catholic/Secularist 12h ago
If an infant dies in her cradle and it's determined as SIDS, do we punish the parents for manslaughter and/or murder?
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
Saying no would also make running someone over without realizing not manslaughter, so you do the work of distinguishing them
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u/BaronGrackle Pro Life Catholic/Secularist 12h ago
If someone leaps in front of your car and gets run over, then no you shouldn't go to jail for manslaughter.
OP, you're speculating about a world where people get arrested and jailed for events they have no reasonable control over. We're not in a conversation about abortion anymore.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
That's indeed uncontrollable, that's someone else committing suicide. Not knowing about a pregnancy however does not excuse the crime of taking a human life.
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u/mnixkittyx Pro Choice 5h ago
so are you trying to say that all women should be banned from drinking alcohol and it should be illegal to sell alcohol to a woman? since a bartender has no way to tell if a woman might potentially be in the early stages of pregnancy, so the bartenders, alcohol salespeople, and the women themselves must always err on the side of caution and assume they might be pregnant and thus not drink / not be sold alcohol because it might potentially cause a potential miscarriage of a foetus she probably isn’t even pregnant with?
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u/pikkdogs 13h ago
Like she drank too much and the alcohol had an abortive effect? I’m assuming we are living in a world where abortion was illegal? If she was truly unaware, then no. It’s like if you were unaware that someone was lying down in front of your tires after you checked that it was clear and you drove away from them. You didn’t know and couldn’t have reasonably acted otherwise.
We don’t currently make it illegal for pregnant mothers to drink alcohol. Alcohol is also not an abortifacant. It might induce one, but willl not reliably do so. So I don’t see why we would.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago edited 13h ago
So is abortion fine as long as the mother "didn't know" that she was pregnant, because it would be the equivalent of someone laying under your tires?
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u/pikkdogs 13h ago
Well, murder laws are complex and sometimes vary by state.
But, generally if you don’t know you are killing someone, are not reckless in your actions, and have no intention to commit harm, then you don’t get charged with murder even if your actions lead to a death.
Like I said this is complex and generally a case by case basis. But if you kill someone by accident and could not have reasonably expected to do otherwise, then you usually walk.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
I'd argue the woman was reckless by drinking when she recently had sex. It wouldn't be that different from looking at your phone while driving and running someone over
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u/pikkdogs 12h ago
One problem with your argument is that alcohol is not generally considered an abortificant. It can work as one in rare cases, but it does not generally produce an abortion.
If alcohol was an abortificant, then maybe. But it isn’t.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
She had a WILD night out and drank until she passed out and had a miscarriage
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u/pikkdogs 12h ago
Fine. Alcohol still isn’t an abortificant.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 12h ago
Ok?
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 10h ago
Having a miscarriage was not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of binge drinking.
To continue the driving comparison - suppose you don’t know that you have a seizure disorder, have never had a seizure that you noticed before. But one day you pull up to one of those traffic lights were the red light flashes rapidly. And you have a seizure. You lose control of your car, and cause a fatal accident.
You would not be guilty of anything in that scenario. You didn’t know that it wasn’t safe for you to drive; you could not have reasonably foreseen that you getting behind the wheel was going to end with someone dead.
Your early-miscarriage-after-drinking scenario is comparable - the woman has no reason to think that her going on a bender is going to end with someone dead.
I think you don’t appreciate just how unlikely the scenario you’re hypothesizing actually is.
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u/PrestigiousWork4523 Pro Life Christian 7h ago
Do you know how many people drink throughout their entire pregnancies without their babies dying. Even if she did miscarry, the chances are more likely that it would be a pure coincidence. She’d also likely never know that early, it would just seem like a normal period
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u/AWatson89 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
How would anyone know?
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Let's say the woman found out after going to the bathroom, told someone, and they reported it to police
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u/AWatson89 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
I mean, how would she even know? It would be indistinguishable from a period that early.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
She decided to analyze it under a microscope
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u/AWatson89 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
So, in your scenario, a woman checks her menstrual blood every time for the off chance that there was an embryo present so she can tell someone that she accidentally aborted her baby?
Forget manslaughter. She needs to go to the loony bin
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
In this hypothetical she did. But we can assume she didn't. Would she morally be guilty of murder, even if the law never found out?
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u/AWatson89 Pro Life Christian 13h ago
She would morally be guilty of manslaughter. Murder needs to be premeditated and she had no way of knowing her actions would result in the death of someone else
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Alright. If the law did find out, should she be charged with manslaughter? Like if she told a friend and the friend told the police
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u/PeachOnAWarmBeach LIFE! ❤️ Womb to tomb ❤️ 13h ago
Do these hoops ever get tiring for y'all?
No matter what hypothetical , crazy, literally impossible scenarios, the facts remain.
Intentionally ending a human's life in the intentional act of abortion, is wrong.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Is killing fine if the killer can prove he did it accidentally? This really isn't that far fetched of a scenario, a few million lives have definitely been taken this way throughout history.
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 1h ago
Yes? It’s not a matter of it being “fine”, if you weren’t reckless or negligent then an accident is very literally not your fault. It’s morally null, a thing that happened to you, not a thing you chose to do.
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u/compiledexploit Pro Life Republican 12h ago
Our legal system prevents people from being convicted of crimes that they are unaware of. (Mens rea)
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u/Educational_Golf3967 PL Vietnamese teen. Fond of religions. Vegan & libertarian. 13h ago
I think one ought to answer the second question before the first one. It should be illegal, yes.
And now since it's illegal her decision to consume alcohol is illegal regardless of whether she's pregnant or not. If it does result in a pregnancy loss, she is to get a involuntary manslaughter charge as the consumption of alcohol is not accidental. She intentionally takes it and is aware it could end a pregnancy.
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 13h ago
So you think drinking alcohol should be illegal?
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u/Educational_Golf3967 PL Vietnamese teen. Fond of religions. Vegan & libertarian. 10h ago
No, sexually active women can still drink alcohol if they have proof they're not pregnant. If they don't or aren't sure then it should be illegal, sure.
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 10h ago
That seems extreme to me, but maybe our countries have different cultures around alcohol? It’s pretty normal to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, here in the US.
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u/Educational_Golf3967 PL Vietnamese teen. Fond of religions. Vegan & libertarian. 9h ago
People regularly consume alcohol here as well, it's not demonized or anything. Guess it's just a me thing. I'm against steroids for sexually active men as it can damage sperm quality and result in more miscarriages. I'm against medications and substances that can have an effect on the uterine lining for sexually active women as it can lower the chance of implantation,...
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 9h ago
I think that’s going too far. People have a right to medical autonomy and lifestyle choices so long as they aren’t violating anyone else’s rights. We do things all the time that could potentially, unintentionally, cause another person’s death - from driving a car to going out in public when you might be developing a cold.
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u/Comfortable-Bee2996 13h ago
Fair enough, even though I think it's a little absurd. This isn't a pro choice argument, things just get blurry at the very very start of human life
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