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Comment by mrlonglong | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe she tried to get out of it by having babies. I feel for her kids, it's going to be really shit for them.

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That is one way to frame it, the other is that if she suspected that she was going to be going to prison for 10+ years she would be 48 on release and unlikely to be able to start a family. Dispite being a criminal, she is a human with human instincts and may have just wanted to actually have children?

That's not to say that having children just before going to prison for 10 years isn't cruel to those babies.

People are complex and often very flawed.

Edit:

To add, I have no sympathy for her, but the thought of being disconnected from my children for 10 years fills me with such fear that I imagine she has made her sentence even more torturous than it would have been.

If her kids don't end up resenting her for being absent for 10+ years, they will when they grow up enough to learn about everything she did.

I would rather have a prison mommy than not existed.

Yes, this could make for a fine, touching, family movie. Girl, Disrupter. For a plot twist, Elizabeth breaks out of the joint, leaving her daughters with the guard. "Can you watch them just for a second?"

By that rationale people should have as many children as physically possible because surely those children would prefer that to not existing?

Isn't there a less cynical explanation, that she wanted to have children and, facing the prospect of over a decade in prison, that this was her last opportunity to have them?

That’s incredibly selfish on her part if that’s the case.

That’d be barely better, because the children would still suffer.

So she knew she was going to prison, and decided to bring kids in to the world to grow up without a mother? That's even worse.

Edit: typo

I think the father is pretty wealthy, I'm sure there will be some downsides but they will have a decently easy life.

Alright, that's enough internet for today, good night everybody.

Growing up rich without a mother is certainly better than growing up poor without a mother. I can attest to the latter, wouldn't wish it on anyone.

She could've had kids anytime, especially over the past 7 years. Looking at it now, it's hard to see it as anything but a manipulative attempt to delay the trial (and the strategy succeeded in buying her 3 months) and seek a more sympathetic sentence.

Getting pregnant at age 40 isn't easy, especially twice in less than two years. Highly likely both were IVF induced, the timing was just too perfect.

Plenty of women get pregnant at 40+ naturally. It might take more time and is higher risk of losing the baby, but no need to jump to any conclusion.

Yeah and she could have wanted to have kids at some point. Facing a period in prison that will take her past her fertile years, she had to make a decision.

Looks like the second plan she didn't really think all the way through...

Good point. There's always a lot of self-righteous judgment with these sort of things. Not trying to necessarily defend Ms. Holmes, but the objective reality is that no one knows her motivations.

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