Earlier this month a judge ordered a mentally unstable woman to be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse” into an abortion and a sterilization procedure.
The woman who said she is a Catholic didn’t want an abortion but the judge says he knew better. He said if she weren’t mentally unstable, she would clearly opt to abort her child and get herself sterilized.
An appeals court thankfully overturned this decision.
The Boston Globe reports:
The Massachusetts Appeals Court today reversed a probate judge’s decision to order a schizophrenic woman to undergo an abortion and to then be sterilized, saying the woman had consistently expressed her opposition to the practice as a Catholic.
In October, the state Department of Mental Health filed a petition to have the woman’s parents named as guardians for the woman, who is only known as “Mary Moe,’’ so they could give consent for an abortion, according to the court.
Norfolk Probate and Family Court Judge Christina Harms, declared that the 32-year-old woman was not competent to make a decision about an abortion, citing “substantial delusional beliefs,” and concluded she would choose to abort her pregnancy if she were competent.
Earlier this month, Harms ordered that the woman’s parents be appointed as coguardians and that Moe could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse” into a hospital where she would be sedated and an abortion would then be performed, the ruling stated.
The judge also ordered the facility that performed the abortion to sterilize the woman “to avoid this painful situation from recurring in the future.”
The Appeal Court’s decision, released today, reversed the sterilization order in unusually strong terms.
“No party requested this measure, none of the attendant procedural requirements has been met, and the judge appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air,” wrote Appeals Court Judge Andrew Grainger.
In today’s Moe ruling, the court also concluded that Harms improperly decided the matter of Moe’s competence, and noted that a court-appointed guardian had determined Moe would decide against an abortion if competent.
According to the court, the woman showed up at a hospital emergency room last Oct. 15 where it was discovered that she was pregnant – and doctors concluded that Moe would be more harmed than the fetus if she was taken off medication used for the treatment of her mental illness.
Harms said the woman would “not choose to be delusional” if competent, and would choose to have an abortion “in order to benefit from medication that otherwise could not be administered due to its effect on the fetus.”
It turns out that the woman in question had previously had an abortion so maybe she understands the horror of abortion. And where the heck were all the women’s lib folks on this? I mean, think about this, a MAN was making a choice that only a woman should be allowed to make!!! Isn’t that 21st century heresy? Isn’t it only a woman’s decision? But oddly, they didn’t seem to mind a man making the choice for a woman because it had a happy ending -abortion.
This just shows you that people who say they’re all about women’s rights are actually just for abortion. Forced or not.
January 17, 2012 at 9:24 pm
I mean, think about this, a MAN was making a choice that only a woman should be allowed to make!!!
–Either I misread your argument or you misread the the article. The judge who ordered the abortion was a woman. The judge who overturned the decision was a man.
January 17, 2012 at 10:09 pm
The only surprising thing about this case is that the decision was overturned. It won't be long before healthy Catholic women will find themselves in the same situation, with the judges equating their Catholicism with “substantial delusional beliefs” requiring forced sterilization and abortion.
January 17, 2012 at 10:49 pm
It's so sad–reading the article, I think it sounds as though a previous abortion may have had some role in precipitating the psychotic break that must be responsible for her mental illness. But pro-aborts would probably read it differently: that abortion was the sane choice and life was the insane choice.
January 18, 2012 at 1:56 am
Presumably the judge's reasoning for the woman getting an abortion is that the woman is mentally ill. I cannot quite fathom then why the judge states that if the woman were competent she would get an abortion. Would that not remove the judge's rationale for having an abortion in the first place?
January 18, 2012 at 3:10 am
The contortions the lower court judge underwent to get to a point at which it could completely disregard the woman's right and duty to protect her baby and determine the baby should be killed are wildly and dangerously illogical. What it amounted to was a judge taking an ideological flight of fancy that had nothing to do with the law. The judge clearly was of the personal opinion, not grounded in any law or natural justice, that the woman's unborn child should be killed against her clearly expressed will, because the woman had a mental illness and that the woman should be tricked into the abortion. What that original errant decision also showed was that the forced abortion was not even aimed (albeit erroneously) at preserving the woman's health – they didn't even try to pretend that was so. Rather the court tried a wholly dishonest, unnecessary and irrelevant exercise of determining what the woman would have decided "if she were competent" when 1. the woman was clearly competent to decide and communicate that she didn't want her baby killed, and 2. abortion is not life-saving or an illness curing therapeutic procedure but an unnecessary, invasive one with adverse sequelae, temporary and permanent. The woman made a most sane decision – to protect her baby and avoid inherently harmful operation; and yet it was not what certain other people wanted, so they sought to use her illness against her so that they could have the abortion carried out against her will. It is horrific that they went to court to try to get their way. And, if they really had evidence that the woman was unable to act in her own interests e.g. consent to sexual intercourse, then why was she not given proper care and supervision so that she could not have had sex?
January 18, 2012 at 2:35 pm
The morally deficient Probate Court judge who issued this disgusting ruling was the appropriately named Judge Harms. She was a Dukakis appointee who has since retired from the bench.
January 18, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Good grief!
Thank God she won the appeal for her baby's life.
I nursed more than one mother with schizophrenia through her pregnancy. It's not easy, but the mothers did well and so did their babies.
Now I am disabled. A doctor who saw me during one of my post disability pregnancies told me bluntly "People like you shouldn't really be allowed to have babies."
She has met me for five minutes – and I was using crutches that day not the wheelchair. What on earth would she had said if I'd wheeled into her room???