Rya Kibby: the stowaway whose abortion forced Roslin's hand
Rya Kibby was a 17-year-old from Gemenon, four months pregnant, who stowed away on Galactica to reach Doctor Cottle and then claimed asylum rather than be sent home. The row that followed ended with Laura Roslin banning abortion and letting Kibby have hers.
Rya Kibby was a 17-year-old woman from Gemenon, four months pregnant, who sneaked aboard Galactica to get an abortion from Doctor Sherman Cottle. Her parents were alive and wanted her back, and the fight over whether she had to go turned a single teenager into a constitutional problem for the Fleet.
Who was Rya Kibby?#
She was a Gemenese teenager with living parents, four months into a pregnancy she did not want, who got herself onto a warship because that was where the doctor was.
Going to Cottle was a practical decision about medicine. Staying aboard once her family could reclaim her was something else, and Kibby understood the difference well enough to ask for asylum rather than plead.
Why did the case reach the President?#
Because asylum is a political question rather than a medical one, and granting it meant Roslin choosing between a frightened 17-year-old and the votes of an entire Colony.
Sarah Porter and the Gemenese delegation made the second option expensive. Roslin's answer was to split it. She proclaimed a ban on abortions in the Fleet going forward, which is what Gemenon wanted, and then let Kibby proceed on the technicality that her request predated the ban, which is what Kibby wanted. Both sides got a result. Neither got the principle.
Sources
- WikiRya Kibby, Battlestar Wiki entry
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Followed from this entry
Laura Roslin: the dying leader
Secretary of Education until the Cylon attack killed everyone above her. Sworn in as President, she became the dying leader of Colonial prophecy.
Galactica
Galactica was a Jupiter-class battlestar that served the Colonial Fleet from the Cylon War until the discovery of Earth. Never networked, it survived the Fall of the Twelve Colonies and shepherded the last fifty thousand humans across uncharted space before being scuttled into the sun.
Gemenon: the First Colony
The first world the Kobol refugees settled, and the most religious of the Twelve Colonies. It shared an orbit with Caprica as a double planet.
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