LogFAQs > #955344831

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Driving requires that a person is licensed. Substituting pregnancy suggests they need the permission of the state to have children. I think China does something like that. Any step in that direction the laws take is too far for my liking.

Don't be obtuse, you know what point I was trying to make. If you don't then sub out driving for walking around in a public place. Legal normaly but not so when drunk. The reason I didn't use a more benign example like that is that in the case of public intoxication there's not usually a huge chance someone will be badly harmed, unlike drunk driving and drinking heavily while pregnant.

Is it the infant that's abstinent? The name of the condition seems contradictory to me since public schooling in the 90's have conditioned me to associate abstinence with not having sex. In which case there shouldn't be an infant.

You can abstain from anything... in this case it is the baby abstaining from the drugs in their mother's body. It isn't that complicated.

We're talking about harm prior to birth, a "baby" has already been born.
A pregnant woman can invoke her right to choose not to give birth and have an abortion.
According to the US constitution an infant becomes a citizen when they are born.
My answer is that they have rights when it doesn't infringe on another person's rights.

That's a non answer to my first question but I take it that it's pretty much a yes? That you would say that it is fine for a women to deliberately harm her unborn child and give it life long pain and suffering without any sort of justification simply because "it's her body"?

Also the laws on abortion in the US make a clear distinction between when a fetus is "viable" or not. There is a limited amount of time after conception where abortions are permitted across the board and after that point where the fetus is getting closer and closer to being able to survive separate from the mother each state is able to do things differently. Hell, even the "late term" abortions people like to debate about and go on marches and protests for/against are "only" in the second trimester. There are only a very small number of places that will or legally can do third trimester abortions. My point is that clearly as shown by the way the law is constructed and basic common sense the "personhood" of a fetus is a gradual thing and not a binary.

Unless they were being a complete contrarian I don't know of anyone who would say it was fine to abort a healthy fetus, say one day before it was to be born. By the same token I think most reasonable people would say this fetus has some rights although it hasn't technically been born yet.