A day or two back I was sent a screenshot of a tweet that claimed to be someone working at the Mayo clinic saying that they loved to tell Trump voters that their healthy pregnancy was in fact ectopic (fetus developing outside the uterus, such as within a fallopian tube), with the result that the twit is happy that this will be a healthy white baby getting needlessly aborted. This tweet is in fact a hoax, but one that keeps making the rounds on regular cycles, outraging those it’s intended to outrage.
But even though it’s fake, it got me thinking. What would happen if some malicious medical practitioner made such diagnoses with the intention of causing people to get abortions? For starter, they would probably not have much success; an ectopic pregnancy is probably not something that can be dealt with with standard surgical abortion practices… at the very least the abortionist would note that the fetus is right where its supposed to be. Perhaps abortion pills would do the job, dunno. But let’s say that this theoretical medical malpractitioner scored some successes and got a few healthy babies aborted. What would be the *legal* result?
I’d assume right off the bat whopping great lawsuits… against the malpractitioner, whatever clinic they worked at, whatever abortion clinic did the job. But how about legal? It’s my understanding that if you assault a pregnant woman and kill her fetus, at least in some states you can be charged with murder (wikipedia says 38 states recognize “feticide”). How about if you trick a woman into getting. an abortion? Abortion is of course legal, which raises the philosophical problem of it being ok to kill a fetus in one instance but not another, murder here being based on the mothers point of view, not the fetus’. Here, a legal act would presumably become illegal because the mother changed her mind after the fact.