Scary examples of women who lost their civil rights for being pregnant

boing
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If “opted to house” were an issue, then the women in these cases would have been questioned to test whether their pregnancy was a voluntary, fully-informed decision before subjecting them to unwanted surgery.
They weren’t questioned; therefore it was not a factor that the women had in some way signed away their rights and took on an obligation to sacrifice their body for the parasites. They are women so they have no rights.

All I could see in the 2-link-deep article was that in one case, allegations that the mother “had used an illegal drug emerged later in the case, but played no role in the murder charge brought against her.” Could you go into more detail about these multiple “direct substance abuse issues”?

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Why must it be “spoken for”? It’s not a fuckin’ human being.

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The people who most loudly bandy about words and phrases like “pro-life,” “liberty,” and “morality” have no idea of what those words actually mean, nor any interest in finding out.

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Interesting thought puzzle. Especially considering the fact that chickens lay eggs whether or not they’re fertilized, so there’s no difference to the mother from a medical/physical POV. If women were laying an egg every month anyway, what’s the difference, right?

The difference is that once born, there’s an actual sentient creature with needs and desires. The number of human and civil rights violations that happen to children who come from unwanted “egg laying” is heart-breaking, and that’s true whether they stay with their family or are fostered or adopted out. It’s actually a good thing that we invest 9 months and our entire bodies to the process, because that means (in countries where the laws protect women as if they were people) that bringing a child into the world is a consciously chosen act.

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And then once the baby is born the state hands off those rights to speak for the baby to that same mother. Everything is super logical. I’m sure that the set of people who believe in laws to curtail women’s reproductive rights is almost entirely contained in the set of people who think that state should never interfere with how parents choose to raise their kids.

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Unfortunately, they sort of do. It’s the excuse given for why the U.S. won’t ratify the U.N. Rights of the Child treaty: they argue that it would mean parents wouldn’t have the freedom to use their religious beliefs as the basis for their family choices. Think corporal punishment, forced adherence to fundamentalist religious practices, home schooling done to avoid teaching topics such as science properly (or at all), etc.

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This is exactly what I had in mind. If someone else doesn’t want to carry a fetus to term, the state has to jump in and take over their bodies. If I want to beat my kid with a stick, the state should go the hell away. I’ll give them a little credit in that I’m sure most of them would be consistent on the if-you-kill-your-kid part of it. It just always strikes me that these people apply a radically different standard to children that have just been born than they do to those that are just about to be born.

In other words, they fundamentally agree that there is a pretty large change in the rights of the child and the mother at the moment of birth - it’s just that somehow they think that the moment of birth should drastically decrease the rights of the child and the extent to which the state should intervene on it’s behalf.

Which is pretty nuts, because as much as I think we can all agree that a fetus can’t speak for its own rights, a one-week-old sure as hell can’t either.

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I don’t believe that a fetus is a human being, I certainly don’t believe that an embryo is a human being. Yet a not so insignificant potion of the electorate is willling to believe otherwise-- that’s why these laws get enacted in the first place.

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Here comes the Republic of Gilead.

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And my family wonders why I deliberately live so dang close to Canuckistan.

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God bless menopause.

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True that. Apologies for directing an earlier comment at you rather than at the theocracy enthusiasts.

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If you really think that’s the only thing going against your position, you’re woefully misguided. It doesn’t take someone of a religious bent to raise questions on just when and where life begins. And painting people who don’t share your view or are unsure on their own as imbeciles isn’t likely to win you many converts.

Look, I’m an agnostic at best, but really much more in the atheism camp. I’m definitely not a fan of the historic legacy left by organized religions. But I don’t have to agree with 99% of what they have and do advocate to give credit to when they’ve got something of a point, that marking the start of life as “Birth” is an artifact of history, and, is relatively arbitrary.

Do I advocate any kind of abortion restrictions, or, am in any way pro-Life? Not really, no. Some of these stories make me very uncomfortable, especially in the danger they present (the arrests seem especially troubling). But, saying it’s obvious that the… Cells in question, are or are not a Human Being… Man, that’s a big leap.

I’ve got a nephew who was born over 2 months premature, who’s now a rambunctious 2 year old. Was he a human being when he was born, or, only closer to his due date? Or was it earlier than that?

I think the question of if there are one or two people’s “civil rights” at stake is a key question, and if you simply skip discussion of that point, of course it seems like a foregone conclusion. The first story of a 26 week pregnant woman is strikingly close to the age of some premies, including my nephew. For that decision to even come before a judge, was there some disagreement/unclarity in who was able to make medical decisions? Once you get there, however, if the judge is forced to not just decide who should be making the decisions, rather, he’s forced by law or circumstances to directly make the decision, it doesn’t seem that far afield to consider all lives impacted, not just the mothers.

Describing fetus as “trespassing” or indicating they can be “evicted” is unhelpful. Nobody has advanced that they made a conscious choice to be where they are, or have the ability to go elsewhere. It’s pretty clear that not having their mother’s womb as a place to be accepted is an existential issue, in the literal sense, for them. We don’t even treat squatters as harshly as that, and they DO make the willful choice to trespass.

Sigh, while I think lines at beating and such are quite just, arguments like these head toward the “children are the property and responsibility of the state” Orwellian direction.

The point I’m making in this isn’t that one position, either the one forwarded or opposing the person I’m quoting is right or wrong, rather that this is messy, murky territory here, with no black and white, and lots of shades of grey. On the one extreme, you’ve got extreme parental control, to do whatever they want with their offspring, up to and including termination, up to the age of majority, on the other end, you’ve got full, state backed rights of the offspring, from the moment of conception, with no decisions whatsoever left to the parents. I don’t think anyone would seriously advocate either pole, but, there’s not a whole lot of clear bright lines to be made between the ends of the continuum either. And there’s a lot of externalities to the issue regardless of the morality of any one particular stance.

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Only if you think that the state should have ownership and protection of fetuses. I was going for quite the opposite. I don’t think that women’s bodies are properties of the state when they are pregnant and I don’t think that children are properties of the state when they are born.

I don’t think people should ever be called property of the state, rather I think that people simply shouldn’t be considered property, even of themselves. We don’t need to use the concept of property to understand everything. The point I was making is that everyone agrees that there is a pretty big difference between an about-to-be-born and a newborn, but that these laws seem to go all bizarro on what the difference is (before they are born they are so much more important than their mothers than their mothers can be incarcerated to protect them from possible harms not yet realized, after they are born they are completely under the control of their mothers and all decisions are made on their behalf by the same people who couldn’t make those decisions a minute ago).

Well, it depends on what you mean by “human being.” In a biological sense, all organisms have an embryonic stage that is part of their life cycle, and clearly that embryo growing in a woman is not a chicken, it’s a human. On the other hand, we don’t test menstrual flow every month to see if there was a “human” that didn’t live past the two-cell stage that is mistaken as a regular period so we can have a funeral. If we started growing kidneys in vats for organ transplants, we wouldn’t mistake them for human beings even though it is 100% biologically undeniable that they are alive and that they are “human”.

For most purposes, we consider a human to be someone who has been born. The UN declaration of humans rights mirrors the US constitution in saying:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Mostly we find the idea that your rights as a human are imbued upon you at birth is an unproblematic one. Your premie nephew was born early, but he was born. He’s a person. No problem.

If he had been born and somehow it came before a judge to decide whether to risk his mother’s life to increase the odds of saving his then that judge would have to weigh that issue, knowing it was two separate humans lives, according to whatever laws exist that created that insane situation. But if the exact same mass of tissue was still inside his mother then instead of being a human it would be a fetus and it would not have at all the same rights. The problem is why the hell a judge is making medical decisions on behalf of a woman or on behalf of a woman and her child?!? That’s just a completely messed up situation. The problem is the law, and that’s exactly what this article is about.

If you want to make a logical argument about when your life began, it’s entirely obvious what the answer is: it began when you mother was in the womb - that’s when the egg cell that eventually became you was formed, and that cell has had a continuous life of it’s own since that time. It also began sometime within a few weeks when you were conceived when a sperm cell that has also continuously existed as a living organism that is now you since that time was created. The fact that the cells that make up you have to be in one blob is also an arbitrary artifact of history, after all - we have a huge bias towards entities that are physically contiguous.

Rights are arbitrary artifacts of history. Laws are arbitrary artifacts of history. You will never produce a better explanation of when life begins then the one I just gave, and you’ll note that the one I gave is supremely unhelpful to any discussion of what or who should have rights. Biology and human rights just aren’t the same thing.

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Obviously we agree he was a human at that point. But, just the same, most his peers, with the same level of development, by your standards, are not. Why would humanness depend on location, of all things? I can buy, to some degree, arguments based on viability, or, development, but, location?

I agree it’s messed up. Nobody’s ideal. My assumption is, there was some fundamental issue or disagreement on who got to decide, and, likely that the mother was certainly unable to decide as a prerequisite of that (unconscious or incapacitated to the point where she was incapable of making medical decisions). If it’s a case of a doctor asserting something over the expressed will of the mother, Definate issues, and 100% with you on that. What’s less clear to me is, when there isn’t a clear answer, someone who doesn’t have a person who clearly has the right to make medical decisions for them, and is unable to make them for themselves, some disagreement between people equally entitled to make such decisions, with a doctor unwilling to express a clear “right” decision (after all, either direction could end in tragedy, as it ultimately DID), it seems like a judge is where that’s going to end up at. And while I would hope they’d restrain themselves to who had the better right to make decisions (aka, who would the person in question want making decisions for them), not judging who wanted to make what they viewed as the “right” decision, in some cases that’s all they have to go on, and in some cases they’ll be characterized as doing that by media accounts even when their own decision makes it clear they are doing no such thing and are instead doing the former.

So, short version, while there’s plenty of ways what was described might well be horrible, there’s also plenty where it was much less so, and that’s been made obscure by summarization/obscuring of the details and gotcha’s. I kind of reserve judgement not knowing the details on that one.

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Well, if you want to define the totality of circumstances of the life of a thing as it’s “location” then I would say humanness does depend on location - I mean, what if I was located a few hundred meter from where I am now amidst the body of the dog with all that dog DNA - I’d be a dog then. If you want to define location as actually where you are located, then being a physically separate entity from your mother vs. being a part of her body is not simply a matter of location.

The woman was conscious and capable of making her own decisions. The judge overrode those decisions. The child was almost certainly already extremely oxygen deprived and had basically no chance of living, the surgery was almost certainly fatal for her (although she was likely not going to live much longer anyway, but she opted for palliative care rather than to be killed on an operating table). The laws were simply used to strip her of her human rights in favour of having a second corpse to bury. The laws are insanely terrible.

I told you above when live begins, and it just doesn’t matter to the discussion of whether or not we should have laws like the ones that were used on this woman. We shouldn’t have those laws. A more detailed discussion of what life is can be found in biology classes, not in human rights discussions.

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The single most obvious bright line between those two poles is birth. Legally and medically, if a baby is born and takes even one gulp of air they are considered to have been born and then died (no matter how little time passes between those two poles), whereas if they never breathe on their own they are considered stillborn, which is the latest possible form of miscarriage.

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So what is the limit? A beer? A sip of whiskey? What about cigarettes? What about walking across the street without looking? Not wearing a seat belt? Who gets to decide the limits and what are they?

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What about being poor?

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Don’t give 'em any ideas!

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