Carla Foster - Justice and Compassion?

HJ has posted on this at the time of trial and sentencing: Woman Jailed for Killing Her Baby - Special Pleading, Outrage and Deflection

Carla Foster was jailed in June for taking pills which claimed the life of stillborn Lily at 32 weeks. Yesterday, the 44-year-old woman won her appeal against her prison term.

Dame Victoria Sharp, sitting with Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Lambert, said Foster's sentence would be reduced to 14 months and that it should be suspended. She said: "This is a very sad case, not least because of the length of the gestation when the offence was committed ... It is a case that calls for compassion, not punishment, and where no useful purpose is served by detaining Ms Foster in custody." Dame Victoria added there was "exceptionally strong mitigation" in Foster's case and that she should be released from prison "immediately".

News of the change in Foster's sentence has, on one side, triggered fresh calls to decriminalise abortion and, on the other side, calls for justice for the dead child and the law to guide morality for the good of all.

Below are two articles illustrating these different perspectives.

Discuss.

The first from the Spectator: Why was Carla Foster ever sent to prison?

The Court of Appeal’s judgement is to be welcomed. It demonstrates compassion for a woman who found herself in a highly unusual and distressing situation and it allows her to be reunited with her three children. Announcing the Court’s decision, the appeal judge, Dame Victoria Sharp, declared that there was ‘exceptionally strong mitigation’ in Foster’s case and that there was ‘no useful purpose’ served by detaining Foster in custody.

Dame Sharp is correct: Foster’s sentence served as neither punishment nor deterrent. Nothing can turn back the clock and prevent Foster from becoming pregnant or resuscitate her dead baby. At her trial, she was said to have demonstrated considerable remorse for her actions. This remorse will no doubt endure, with or without incarceration.

The Court of Appeal heard that Foster has not been allowed to communicate with her children from inside prison. We can be sure they will have missed their mother and experienced great disruption during her absence. It strikes me that campaigners who have expressed pity for Foster’s aborted child would do well to demonstrate similar empathy for her existing children. Having done nothing wrong, they did not deserve to be without their mother for such a long period; incarcerating Foster punished them.

The argument that Foster’s sentence serves as a deterrent to others suggests that the only thing stopping women with unwanted pregnancies from self-administering late term abortions is the fear of a prison sentence. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Only one per cent of abortions are carried out on women who are over 20 weeks pregnant and, for the most part, these are tragic cases of severe foetal disability or where the mother’s life might be at risk if the pregnancy were to continue. Late abortions are probably more likely to be driven by desperation than lifestyle choices taken on a whim.

Foster’s individual circumstances expose the futility of prison as a deterrent for women determined to end a pregnancy. Lockdown led her to return to her husband while pregnant with her ex-partner’s baby. Lockdown may have also curtailed childcare, medical appointments and opportunities for private conversations with friends and trusted family members. This is not to condone but to understand Foster’s actions. She found herself panicked, stressed and anxious in a situation neither she nor any other woman is ever likely to find herself again.

Any woman contemplating illegally procuring pills and self-administering a late term abortion is in a position of extreme desperation, fear and anxiety. The threat of a jail sentence will not deter a woman terrified of the consequences of giving birth from seeking to terminate her pregnancy but it will make an already incredibly stressful situation far worse.

With no reasonable basis for imprisoning Foster it is good that compassion has prevailed and she will be released. But, thanks to laws criminalising abortion, Foster still finds herself with a criminal record and a 14-month suspended sentence. We urgently need to reconsider Britain’s abortion laws: not to celebrate late term abortions as a lifestyle choice, but to recognise that the criminal courts are no place to be passing judgement on the private lives and medical decisions of often desperate women. In 2019, abortion was decriminalised in northern Ireland. It is time the rest of the UK followed suit.

The other side from The Critic: Compassion demands justice - Tragic circumstances do not excuse horrendous crimes

After baby *Stanley Mayo took his first breath, it wasn’t long until his last.

His mother, deciding that he must die that day, crushed his head — most likely with her foot. He was battered. But still he lived. So following the first assault, she shoved cotton wool balls deep into his throat. After clearing his limp body and the placenta into a black bin bag, she went to sleep. This week, for this unthinkable crime, she was found guilty and sent to prison.

The heartbreaking and disturbing case of Paris Mayo and her baby, Stanley, has shaken all who hear of it. Rarely does one hear of such a tragic murder going hand-in-hand with sympathetic coverage of the perpetrator, however. Paris, aged 15, had been in clear denial as to her pregnancy. Shocked and traumatised, she gave birth alone in her bathroom, terrified that her parents would hear and discover the pregnancy. And so, she killed her baby. Such are the circumstances of her trauma, that many commentators question if a twelve-year jail sentence is really fair for a young girl committing such terrible deeds in a state of clear panic.

The sentence has been handed down only weeks after another woman was jailed for a similar crime. Carla Foster deliberately suffocated her eight-month-old child in utero with mifepristone abortion pills, which are intended for self-directed use during only the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. She had lied about the length of her pregnancy on the phone with abortion provider BPAS. Making no attempt to check the accuracy of her claim via ultrasound, nor examining whether she might have been suffering any medical complications, BPAS sent her pills in the post — an act of sheer medical recklessness.

At eight months pregnant, the only “choice” abortion pills offered Carla was whether to give birth to a live baby or a dead one. She chose the latter. After delivering her daughter — whom she later named “Lily” — Carla was distraught with regret and haunted by the face of her viable, sentient baby, capable of feeling the pain of her death, who would easily have survived and thrived in the world had she been delivered alive at that stage.

For killing baby Lily, Carla received a prison sentence of four years.

Carla committed acts of extreme brutality against helpless, innocent infants. Yet few would look upon them without at least a shred of human compassion. Both mothers must clearly have been in states of severe mental distress to upend the laws of nature so brutally.

Should we withhold justice in such cases, out of compassion?

Condoning the taking of innocent human life without consequence is never the solution Such would be the argument of the abortion lobby. Despite being largely responsible for enabling Carla’s time in prison through inexcusable negligence, BPAS has politically manipulated her story to campaign for decriminalising abortion up to birth.

In the UK, it is currently unlawful to intentionally end the life of a child older than six months (24 weeks) in utero, unless they have any form of disability. Increasing that boundary up till full term — till nine months in utero — would mean that more women like Carla could abort healthy late-term babies for any reason without facing any legal consequences. Instead of having a legal line of protection at 24 weeks (already double the average European abortion limit), the line of distinction between lawful and unlawful killing would depend then on geography — whether a baby is outside the womb or not. No consequences for Carla, then. Where would that leave Paris?

If abortion were decriminalised up until birth, Paris would still face jail for killing her child outside of the womb. This brings to light clear logical inconsistencies — how do we reconcile permissible late term abortion with legal consequences for the murder of a just-born child? How do we account compassionately for mothers in traumatic situations like hers?

The next step, surely, would be to widen the circle again. Decriminalise the ending of a child’s life until when — the first day after birth? The first week? The first month, or year? Where do we draw the line between justice for the child (who, as a member of our human family, has the same rights to life and health as all of us) and excusing the mother? The answer isn’t easy, but condoning the taking of innocent human life without consequence is never the solution.

The slippery slopists might well be right once again. Laws ultimately guide morality. Without law, we have unchecked brutality. With unchecked brutality, the weakest of society lose out, facing injustice and violence and death. Justice and compassion aren’t opposed. They co-exist.

We must do all we can to support women who have faced pregnancy- and abortion-related trauma with the counselling and care that they need to find healing. Averting and eroding justice after wrongdoing is not the answer, however. Removing prohibitions on late-term abortion or infanticide would only lead to the death of more innocent children like Lily — and more distress and trauma for mums like Carla, who describes being tormented in the aftermath of delivering her stillborn baby. The law is not there only to punish. It’s there to protect. In respect to the horrors faced by Carla, Lily, Paris and Stanley, we must keep it that way.

[The details of Paris and Stanley Mayo can be read here. They make very distressing reading.]