I've heard from some pro-choice people that a woman can do what she wants to a fetus because (among other reasons) a fetus has no rights. Including and especially killing it. If you aren't of this opinion, this thread probably isn't for you.
My question regarding this level of autonomy over the self and authority over the fetus is this...
Should a pregnant woman be allowed to intentionally cause birth defects? Why or why not?
Consider this: Thalidomide was a drug used to treat pain in pregnant women. When it was found to cause severe birth defects, the product was pulled from the market. Should a woman have the right to take thalidomide even though she knows it will cause severe birth defects?
If it is ok to kill fetuses, why isn't it ok to deform them?
Inb4youcantkillwhatsnotalive
I'm pro-choice, but it's a free subform. :mrgreen:
And here we run into the problem of thinking of ethics in a strictly legalistic framework...
Laws are not meant to police morality. They are meant to protect society from serious harm.
And "serious harm" is not always straightforward.
Sometimes the law must simply choose the worst of two simultaneous harms in order to decide what they will enforce. Sometimes a harm is not severe enough to be considered worthy of making a law about. Sometimes protecting from one harm is mutually exclusive it protecting against another, so the decision is made simply on timing. The conflict between legal abortion and the question of the ethics of causing non-lethal fetal harm could fall into any of these categories, depending on how you look at abortion. For me, it falls into the last.
Is it ethical for a woman to harm a fetus she intends to carry to term? No. Why isn't it ethical? Because someday, a person capable of suffering might have to live in that messed up body. And they are responsible for that suffering.
However, it is impossible to enforce this in a legalistic framework without making women literal slaves who are surveilled or housed by the state. And how exactly would you justify that ethically? We don't live in a society that considers women to be chattel anymore.
We cannot completely police everything women do to their bodies. And furthermore, some things do the most damage to a fetus very early in pregnancy when a woman might not even be aware she's pregnant (alcohol, for one unfortunate example).
And then there's things like thalidomide, which is actually used primarily to treat cancer and resistant TB. Let's assume for a moment that there was no other drug that did the things thalidomide can do.
Would you deny a woman the only treatment available for her cancer or TB -- both deadly conditions -- because it might deform her fetus?
How do you make that decision in a legal framework?
The answer is: you can't. This is not a question that the law can answer. You cannot decide a woman's life simply matters less than a fetus (or a born person, for that matter) under the law. At least not using anything but the most extremely sexist and dehumanizing bigotry.
If viable alternatives for treatment exist -- which they do -- then the medical establishment has the obligation to use alternatives to treat pregnant women, under the oath of "do no harm."
But if they do not, neither the law nor the medical establishment has any right to make that decision. The woman is the one who gets to make that decision.
And women still do have to make that decision routinely. There are many medical conditions that put her at the difficult crossroads between putting her own life at risk, or the fetus', from kidney disease to extreme mental illness. This is a decision being faced by women to this day.
In situations like that, is it ethical for a woman to choose to harm the fetus? No.
But is it ethical for her to harm herself instead? No. She has a right to defend her life.
There is no "ethical" decision in cases like this. It's like the classic moral quandary of "Two people are drowning. You can only save one. Here are some superficial characteristics about them. Who do you pick?"
There is no ethical answer. One life is not worth any more than another.
This is not the place of law to be deciding.
As a society, we should build a culture where women who wish to carry are encouraged to take good care of their bodies and their pregnancies and informed on how to do so, to give their potential child the best start in life they can have. Because if that is at all possible, then yes, that is the only ethical choice. Forcing another life into being carries a tremendous ethical burden to do your best by them, in fact.
But life is often not that simple. And when it's not, it's frankly no one's business to brow-beat women in impossible situations, who simply didn't know, or to use some theoretical possibility that never happens in reality as a justification to enslave an entire sex.
