Yep, just a touch.
Feel free to continue to be glad this lady got her conviction overturned. Oh, and you might want to read the ruling before you make sweeping statements about it not having something to do with personhood.
Anyway, miss the forest for the trees.
"...After several years of court cases, in 2012 Jorgensen was convicted of killing her child and sentenced to nine years in prison. Naturally she appealed the decision with her attorneys offering a two pronged defense. First they say that she never intended to purposefully kill her baby (so premeditated murder is not the case) and secondly according to New York law her baby wasn’t really a “person” so she couldn’t be convicted of killing it. The reasoning on the latter is that the baby was not yet born during the accident so it didn’t matter that it was pulled out of her later and lived six days outside her before its death.
So, Jorgensen’s defense team appealed still maintaining that the conviction was wrong based on the fact that the baby was not yet born at the time of the accident.
This week the Court of Appeals for the state of New York has agreed with the defense. In its decision the majority of the court determined that Jennifer Jorgensen cannot be charged with the murder of her child despite that it was alive outside her body for six days before it died. Her baby, the court ruled, wasn’t a human.
The dissenting judge, Eugene Fahey, was thoroughly disgusted by the majority ruling saying, “I cannot join in a result that analyzes our statutes to determine that a six-day-old child is not a person.”
At first blush this does seem to be an outrageous ruling. But maybe not for the reasons you might think.
Before we get too upset at the court, let’s understand that on a strict reading of the state’s law regarding who is and who is not a “person,” well, the fact is the court is probably right in the Jorgensen case. If the baby had died in utero as a result of the accident and was still born as a result, prosecutors would never have charged the mother with murder in the first place. Why? Because according to New York law a baby isn’t a person until its umbilical cord is cut and it is breathing on its own.
As the Appeals Court decision notes, state law holds that a person cannot be murdered unless they are “a human being who has been born and is alive.” In the case of Jorgensen, her baby was clearly not yet born at the time that she perpetrated the reckless behavior that eventually killed her baby.
But this is still an outrage quite despite that this particular decision is probably a correct reading of the law. In this case it is clearly the legislature’s fault, not the court’s, and shows how iffy it is to say that a human doesn’t count as human until after they are “born.”
After all, it is a horribly cold, heartless–yes, even inhuman–thing to say that a baby that can be born alive through medical technology doesn’t count as a “person.”
This law essentially says that a human is not a “person” until they pass through the portal of birth, as if the birth canal itself bestows “personhood” on human beings. This is such an arbitrary and silly claim that it makes a mockery of the law not to mention belittles life itself.
The idea that you are not a person on one side of the birth canal but you are on the other is absurd–especially in light of the capabilities of modern medicine.
This case lays bare the illogic of proclaiming that a human doesn’t count as a person until it clears the birth canal. And the reason these illogical backflips are made in legislatures across the country is merely to give sanction to abortion–which is murder, too, but that truth can’t be said for political reasons."
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