From: Barbara Lamar (shabrika@juno.com)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 12:44:24 MDT
On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 09:01:58 -0700 hal@finney.org writes:
> Barbara writes:
> In our present legal (and moral) system, a newborn baby cannot be
> killed
> even though as Barbara accurately point out it represents a far
> greater
> long-term drain on the mother's resources than the fetus. However
> the
> reason is that there is an escape clause: anyone can give up a baby.
> No one is forced to keep a child.
Turning the child over to someone else was one of the options I had in
mind when I wrote that a mother (should? could?) have the right to
dispose of her newly born baby. Because I was including infanticide as
an option and went on to say that death is in some cases preferable to
life, the other options were overlooked. (dispose = to put in place; to
settle a matter; to transfer to the control of another / Webser's 9th
Collegiate Dictionary)
In fact, for a child who isn't adopted by caring adults, life can be
grim whether the child is put into an institution or kept by the mother.
I personally know a child whose ribs were broken by his mother during the
first month of his life. This and the other abuses he suffered left him
emotionally scarred, and by the time the mother decided she didn't want
to keep him, he was unadoptable. And this kid's white. For the
non-white kids, especially if they have physical or mental abnormalities,
the idea of adoption is more like a bad joke.
If a mother chooses not to bear a child it would be better to kill the
fetus early on, I agree, if for no other reason than to spare the mother
the additional weeks of carrying it. Better still to kill it when it's
still in the embryonic stage. But there are times--and I know this from
personal observation--when a woman has no idea she's pregnant until the
fetus is pretty large.
The point I was trying to make by bringing up the idea of killing a
newly born baby is that the classification of human fetuses/babies
according to length of time from conception is arbitrary. A tiny fetus
that could fit in the palm of your hand can, at great expense, be brought
to term in an incubator. From what I've read, such fetuses are sometimes
still alive when they come out of the mother's womb during an abortion,
as are larger fetuses on accasion. Therefore infanticide IS being
practiced. People just pretend that it's not, because the idea isn't
acceptable to them.
I've seen arguments about whether or not fetuses can feel anything. Of
course they can feel. I've dealt with non-human animals (cats, lambs,
hamsters, rabbits) who've had spontaneous abortions, and also chickens
whose eggs I've opened, thinking they were dead; and the immature animals
that come out can obviously feel--what they feel I don't know for sure,
but the way they writhe around indicates that it's not pleasant. Why
pretend they can't feel? (I've read literature intended to help women
reach a decision on whether or not to get an abortion, and it stated that
a fetus cannot feel)
I believe that more rational decisions can be reached if reality is
respected and plain words are used in place of euphemisms.
> Once that becomes possible, it might be that society will change the
> laws to treat fetuses the same as babies. You can have an abortion
> any
> time you want, but you must do it non-destructively.
Yeah, these are the sorts of questions I wanted to look at.
The unwanted
> fetus
> will be transfered to another womb, perhaps artificial. In effect
> you
> are giving it up for adoption. Doing abortions in the present way
> would
> be considered murder, and a pregnant woman failing to guard the
> health
> of her fetus would be child abuse.
>
> Could this be a compromise on the abortion issue acceptable to many
> parties?
I think it might well be acceptable to many people; and it would make
sense if there were unlimited resources so that the children who were
born in this manner could be well cared for.
Here are some questions that occur to me: would the parents give up all
parental rights to a child who was turned over to someone else to bring
to term in an artificial womb? What if the mother wanted to give the
fetus up but the father wanted to keep the child? What would the
father's rights be? Would parents be able to sell the rights to their
fetus? How would a law like this, which treated all embryos as humans,
effect cloned humans or part-humans?
Another option that has recently been mentioned on the list would be to
reversibly sterilize everyone (or conceivably one could sterilize only
all the males or only all the females) so that a positive decision has
to be made before a preganancy occurs.
(in order to avoid the bad feeling that comes with assuming that such
sterilization would take place via some form of government, maybe we
could suppose for purposes of this discussion, that we're talking about
people who voluntarily choose to become members of the group for which
these rules would apply)
This actually sounds like the best option to me. If I were shopping
around for a group to join, I'd probably pick the one that went with mass
sterization with reversal under some circumstances, possibly on demand by
the person who wished to become pregnant.
Here's an interesting thought that occurs to me in connection with
sterilization. What if a husband wishes to procreate but his wife
doesn't? If you were making up the rules for the group you're part of,
would you make a rule that the man should be able to force the woman to
undergo reversal of sterilization? I think most people would say no.
And yet, I think more people would answer yes to the question of whether
or not a woman needs the consent of her husband in order to get an
abortion (assuming present day technology and social conditions). What's
the relevant difference between these 2 situations? (I myself would
choose complete freedom of contract between the woman or the man, so that
each person could make their own decision)
Barbara
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