Posted on 01/18/2017 9:44:00 AM PST by C19fan
Iowa lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow a woman who gets an abortion to sue the doctor who performed the procedure if she experiences emotional distress later.
If approved, it would be the first law of its kind in the U.S.
The proposal, which was endorsed Tuesday by a GOP-led three-member panel of lawmakers, would permit the woman to file a lawsuit at any point in her life, something that goes against typical statute of limitation rules. It could also make the state vulnerable to costly court challenges.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
This ingenious strategy would pit the trial lawyers against the abortion industry.
Maybe they would destroy each other. Win-Win!
WOW! That has a chilling effect. It’s a cash cow for lawyers.
I can’t sign on to this.
I am absolutely anti-abortion for the purpose of killing a growing baby. Sometimes pregnancies do need to end prematurely, due to a health issue, but that does NOT mean that the baby needs to be murdered. Sometimes for example, the placenta is bleeding and the baby needs to come out yesterday to save either life.
I think that this law is bad law. Why? Because countless women suffer after an abortion, and it can take some longer than others to overcome denial. Some don’t even realize that that abortion 15 years ago is giving them PTSD symptoms today. The problem is that Post Abortion Stress Disorder has been denied by the pro-abortion industry for not only years, but decades!
They will admit that the exact same symptoms from PASD occur in women who have had miscarriages, but not for post abortive women. If they admit it’s existence at all, it’s to demean the mental health of the individual suffering it. saying that she was mentally afflicted in some way prior to the abortion, but they refuse to admit that abortion itself can cause such a thing. They will admit that some women do go through a post pregnancy depression such as after having a normal live birth, but they say it should go away after a couple of weeks, that it’s just hormones adjusting.
Well, for many women, that doesn’t happen and in their desperation to get on with their lives as they were promised would happen, they push it to the back until it’s buried. After all, “it’s supposed to be just a bloody piece of tissue like a clot or a tonsil’’.
What DOES need to happen is that the truth needs to come out regarding post abortion emotional, mental, spiritual affects, and women need to be truthfully informed about it along with all of the physical ramifications like sterility, death, bleeding, infection, reactions to anesthesia, etc. like what happens post surgery of any kind.
She needs to know just how often those things can and do occur with truthful numbers, not created ones.
THAT is where laws need to be made, if any. Full information disclosure, and not just a piece of paper listing everything that she blindly signs along with the stack of other papers she has to sign.
She also needs to know what resources might be available to her should she experience post abortion stress disorder. That information needs to include free resources like crisis pregnancy centers which often perform this needed service. Working with post abortive women is a specialty in and of itself! But it doesn’t always take a doctorate degree. There are a number of awesome programs out there...peer counselors who’ve been there and who trained in implementing these programs. There are also a number of books written by people who’ve been there should a woman/teen want to work on her own.
In addition to this, men have issues TOO! It’s not just women who have an unexpected emotional reaction to the abortion they thought they wanted, men do too and the proposed law ignores the men.
I can understand the ‘heart’ behind the proposal of such a law, but it’s bad law and doesn’t really address the issue at all. It’s not necessarily going to cause a doctor to not want to perform abortions. It could however, push him/her back underground where the consequences are in fact, hidden. The problem still exists except now you can’t even prove a doctor did any abortion at all.
If you can’t outlaw it, sidestepping it isn’t the answer. Especially when you’re stepping on the heads of afflicted women, and frequently kids, to do it. A 13 year old is still a kid despite her gestational condition. So’s a 15 year old.
So..no. Bad law, and why.
But how does one establish exclusive damages in such a case?
“I want damages because I’m depressed?” “How much?” “Why that much?” “Prove it was the abortion that caused the damages!” “What else in your life went wrong?” “Why don’t you sue your public school system because you failed 10th grade math?”
Basically, this is “I want damages because of how I think.”
Also, a plaintiff will face the “several / proportionate liability” issues. The doctor didn’t get her pregnant!
Next, we’ll have women who had abortions suing because the aborted child could have supported them later in life, etc. Or suing in the name of the child for being hurt/damaged/murdered in the course of the abortion.
Not getting into the abortion question itself, at all, but clearly, this is not about damages. The courts would quickly see through this. This is simply a backdoor attempt to drive abortion providers out of practice.
It’s a legal non-starter. The problem with legal non-starters is that they weaken your strongest case by conditioning the public and courts to believe you have no case involving any real issue!
Chelgren said federal law requires the state to protect a woman’s mental health.
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I’d rather see a very explicit informed consent law... one that included mental health , breast cancer and clearly stated that a human child , distinct from both parents will be killed in the procedure.
In addition, the strong case here is very simple:
Abortion and the so-called “Right To Privacy” are not federal constitutional issues. Abortion is clearly a state issue.
Finally, regarding the SCOTUS-invented “Right To Privacy;” Any constructionist court is going to get rid of the entire concept as it applies to abortion (what does abortion have to do with privacy?)
Does the Constitution guarantee me the right to eat spinach in private? Is there some danger that abortions would be publicly announced?
The entire Roe v. Wade is bad law, and everyone knows it. Abortion advocates like it because it gave then the decision they like, but in private they acknowledge it is very bad law.
Nah, courts wouldn’t let it fly. It’s clearly an attempt to use the civil courts to effectively outlaw what is an unfortunately legal procedure.
It’s not an undisclosed harm. It’s a harm you cannot monetize. How does a P prove that a procedure they asked for caused a specific set of monetarily measurable damages. What other 100 bad things happened in their life?
Additionally, it’s a procedure they asked for, and were required to undergo psychological counseling for before they had the procedure. “I was young and stupid 20 years ago, so I want money now” would not fly.
Also, P was certainly aware of abortion alternatives.
Additional, to hit the final legal point, if I was representing D, I would argue that any damages must be reduced by the amount not spent by the P raising the child. If the abortion created a monetary advantage for the person having the abortion by not having the costs of raising the child, then any award from the abortionist would have to be reduced by the monetary benefit already accrued to the P!
Again, that’s not an issue because the courts would strike it down. The effective judgement from the courts would be, “if you want to attack Roe, fine, but go to the core of the issue, not this BS.”
I think you have not taken into consideration the following facts:
1) women and even minor girls are NOT required to receive psychological counseling before they undergo an abortion
2) the abortion business is NOT, in most states, required to make sure the client is aware of abortion alternatives
3) it is not difficult, in some cases, to identify a link between symptoms of psychological trauma and, specifically, abortion. Thus could involve expert testimony by psychologists, psychiatrists or other counselors that the patient had recurring crises on specific dates, e.g. the anniversary of the abortion or the due-date of the baby had it been born. There might be a clinical record of suicide attempts. There might be a self-harming pattern related to recall-factors, e.g. panic attacks from experiencing menstrual flow, connected by the patient herself to the abortion bleeding.
Input by expert witnesses and clinical evidence would probably be crucial.
Again, this is not a tattoo removal or a facelift we’re talking about. This is the killing of one’s own child, and the clinical evidence for these kinds of sequelae is not lacking.
The state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices who decided Roe v. Wade against the states actually breached the Founding States’ constitutional division of federal and state powers by “amending” the Constitution from the bench with the politically correct, vote-winning right to have an abortion imo.
So given that there is no express constitutional right to have an abortion, the Iowa bill is an example of a state exercising constitutionally unchecked 10th Amendment-protected state powers imo.
Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!
Remember in November ’18 !
Since Trump entered the ’16 presidential race too late for patriots to make sure that there were state sovereignty-respecting candidates on the primary ballots, patriots need make sure that such candidates are on the ’18 primary ballots so that they can be elected to support Trump in draining the unconstitutionally big federal government swamp.
Such a Congress will also be able to finish draining the swamp with respect to getting the remaining state sovereignty-ignoring, activist justices off of the bench.
Noting that the primaries start in Iowa and New Hampshire in February ‘18, patriots need to challenge candidates for federal office in the following way.
Patriots need to qualify candidates by asking them why the Founding States made the Constitution’s Section 8 of Article I; to limit (cripple) the federal government’s powers.
Patriots also need to find candidates that are knowledgeable of the Supreme Court's clarifications of the federal government’s limited powers listed below.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphasis added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
Sorry, but it’s still a legal non-starter. Courts would correctly hold it was simply a way to try to work an abortion ban into civil law.
I’m against abortion but this is not the way to fight it.
If it were a "non-starter" the left wouldn't be using the same legal theories to push gun-control and sexual assault innovations.
And they are not working, are they.
One final point, any P would have an impossible Statute of Limitations time bar problem.
Although the clock wouldn’t run from the time of the abortion, but from the “first regret,” trying to convince a judge that the time frame from then to the institution of the actions was less than 2 or 4 years in most jurisdictions would be impossible.
Again, save our ammunition for an attack on Roe itself, not this legal non-starter.
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