Tobacco, alcohol, and pro-lifers

[Durandal]

Durandal's got it right. The implications behind this argument are that pregnant women should be charged for willfully harming their children. And if we take that conclusion one step further, we see that abortion could be on sketchy ground. The difference, of course, is that the child does not have to live with the effects of abortive procedures, whereas a child born to, say, a drinking mother obviously will demonstrate severe impairments. I haven't really thought this through -- is there perhaps a more sound argument for abortion while keeping the thread's line of reasoning in mind?

Abortion is different because it implies that the woman has no intent to have the child. And actually, in order to charge a woman smoking while pregnant with criminal negligence and/or assault, you'd have to show intent to have the child in the first place. Now, this wouldn't be all that difficult, as you could subpoena files from the woman's doctor and information from planned parenthood clinics to see if she's been around there. If reasonable efforts toward securing an abortion can't be shown to have been made, then she's guilty.

[Darth Wong]

Durandal's got it right. The implications behind this argument are that pregnant women should be charged for willfully harming their children. And if we take that conclusion one step further, we see that abortion could be on sketchy ground. The difference, of course, is that the child does not have to live with the effects of abortive procedures, whereas a child born to, say, a drinking mother obviously will demonstrate severe impairments. I haven't really thought this through -- is there perhaps a more sound argument for abortion while keeping the thread's line of reasoning in mind?

An aborted fetus will never feel or think anything at all, and in fact, its consciousness never even got started in the first place (assuming early-term abortion; I do not support late-term abortion), so there is no suffering and no loss. A child who is born with severe impairments due to someone else's negligence, on the other hand, is a living being who must suffer as a result. An early-term abortion was never a person at any point in time.

But if you're going to talk abortion, I would also love to know why the vast majority of anti-abortionists are willing to make an exception for rape or risks to the mother's health. One would never be allowed to knife an infant if it was determined that he was the product of rape, nor would one be allowed to knife a baby in some hypothetical scenario where the mother's health is at risk due to the needs of taking care of the child. That's probably an even greater contradiction than the smoking/drinking thing.

[Darth Servo]

An aborted fetus will never feel or think anything at all, and in fact, its consciousness never even got started in the first place (assuming early-term abortion; I do not support late-term abortion), so there is no suffering and no loss. A child who is born with severe impairments due to someone else's negligence, on the other hand, is a living being who must suffer as a result. An early-term abortion was never a person at any point in time.

OK, so lets turn this around. With your stance on abortion (early term = OK, late term =/= OK) how do you stand on the mother drinking, smoking, etc particularly since teratogens are usually the most dangerous during early term when the basic structures are first forming?

[Darth Wong]

An aborted fetus will never feel or think anything at all, and in fact, its consciousness never even got started in the first place (assuming early-term abortion; I do not support late-term abortion), so there is no suffering and no loss. A child who is born with severe impairments due to someone else's negligence, on the other hand, is a living being who must suffer as a result. An early-term abortion was never a person at any point in time.

OK, so lets turn this around. With your stance on abortion (early term = OK, late term =/= OK) how do you stand on the mother drinking, smoking, etc particularly since teratogens are usually the most dangerous during early term when the basic structures are first forming?

Obviously, it's OK only if you abort the fetus. If you carry it to term, then you've got a living, thinking human being who must suffer the consequences of your negligence.

[Broomstick]

Now Susie is a sexually active woman. She smokes and is on the pill. She figures that, since she is on the pill, there is little chance of her getting pregnant. Only she does, and she winds up injuring the fetus with cigarette smoke. This is analogous to the above scenario. So Johnny can be prosecuted, but Susie cannot be?

Now, I'll admit that there's something about the implications of this conclusion that disturbs me a whole lot, but that's the logic as I see it, so unless someone can refute it, I'm going to stick with it.

What that stance implies is that no sexually active woman, on contraception or not, should be permitted to smoke, drink alcohol, or otherwise expose herself to any substance that could possible cause fetal damage. This would severely restrict the activities of women in many ways, from pumping their own gas to owning pet cats.

A sexually active woman who is NOT using contraception and smokes is more analogous to the kid dropping quarters off a tall building. A woman using contraception and winds up pregnant is more like a woman who doesn't realize there's a hole in her pocket and she's dropping coins. If you don't realize until you've dropped three quarters you're shedding coins, are you still equally liable as someone delibrately dropping coins?

[Broomstick]

The difference, of course, is that the child does not have to live with the effects of abortive procedures, whereas a child born to, say, a drinking mother obviously will demonstrate severe impairments.

Actually, that's not the case.

There are people born to actively alcoholic women who do NOT show impairment. So, if you insist on abortion you will have to accept that you will be aborting some fetuses that could have developed into normal, healthy individuals. Maybe that wouldn't bother you, maybe it would. And there are other instances where the mother has consumed only one or two drinks and wound up with a severely disabled child. But even there, you have to ask whether it was the alcohol or maybe some other factor that result in the disability - after all, you can do everything correctly while pregnant and still wind up with a less than perfect baby.

It has only been since about the 1970's that pregnant women where actively told by doctors not to drink. Beer bottles didn't always carry those warning labels. Indeed, a century ago women were sometimes encouraged to drink beer while pregnant (it actually contains a lot of B vitamins - pity about that alcohol content, though). Since the entire populace up until 1975 or 1980 wasn't born with signs of fetal alcohol syndrome clearly alcohol is not the Sudden Death Lethal in Any Dose Horrific Toxin it is sometimes made out to be. There was some recognition that babies born to "drunks" were more likely to have problems, but the level of alcohol consumption considered normal - even for pregnant women - a century or more ago is shocking to most of us today.

Obviously, once a woman knows she's pregnant she should stop drinking immediately, and if she can't do it on her own then help should be provided. And once a woman is pregnant she shouldn't be changing her cat's litterbox, either, but I don't see anyone proposing jailing women for risking toxoplasmosis.

I understand a certain temptation to bitch-slap the women who won't give up bad habits or addictions, but what is the real goal here? Do you want to punish the women? Illinois tried that back in the mid '90's and wound up discovering that jail is a really lousy place to either be pregnant or have a miscarriage - jails are build under the assumption most people incarcerated are male and have few provisions, if any, for pregnant women.

Do you want the best outcome for the potential child? Then you have to treat it as a medical problem. This might mean involuntary confinement in a medical facility, where pregnancy and its potential complications can be dealt with.

I worked at a drug rehab clinic for four years, and we had a unit specifically for pregnant addicts and alcoholics. And yes, you DO want to knock some sense into these people. But we also proved that if you get these women prenatal care (lack of which can ALSO cause severe problems) and a support system to help them stay off the street drugs you wind up with a normal kid nine out of ten times. Personally, if the woman doesn't abort I'd rather see something done to maximize the chances of a normal child.

Of course, if the woman refuses to cooperate throw the book at her - AFTER she has the kid. Because if you punish a pregnant woman it can have an effect on the child, who shouldn't be made to suffer more than necessary. And yeah, we did have to take children away from some of the women. Personally, in some cases, I think the woman in question should have been sterilized but that wasn't going to happen for a bunch of reasons.

But just one cigarette or (usually) just one drink is not going to result in a drooling, deaf, dumb and blind idiot twitching in a corner.

[Durandal]

What that stance implies is that no sexually active woman, on contraception or not, should be permitted to smoke, drink alcohol, or otherwise expose herself to any substance that could possible cause fetal damage. This would severely restrict the activities of women in many ways, from pumping their own gas to owning pet cats.

This is the same argument that people use for smoking in general. "Well I breathe in a ton of carcinogens daily from regular air, what're a few more from a cigarette?" No one is saying pregnant women shouldn't be able to pump gas, because pumping gas is something that is frankly necessary. There's just no getting around it. Smoking a cigarette is not necessary to function in society.

As for owning pet cats ... since when are cats a concrete danger to an unborn fetus?

A sexually active woman who is NOT using contraception and smokes is more analogous to the kid dropping quarters off a tall building.

How so? I've specified that the kid in the scenario is dropping quarters off the building at 3 in the morning, when there is minimal pedestrian traffic. And the woman in question is having sex while using a contraceptive, with minimal change of becoming pregnant. So what is inaccurate about this analogy?

A woman using contraception and winds up pregnant is more like a woman who doesn't realize there's a hole in her pocket and she's dropping coins. If you don't realize until you've dropped three quarters you're shedding coins, are you still equally liable as someone delibrately dropping coins?

Again, you cannot accidentally smoke a cigarette. Smoking cigarettes and dropping quarters off the building are the two events being compared here.

[Imperial Overlord]

Durandel, the relevant line is:

And once a woman is pregnant she shouldn't be changing her cat's litterbox, either, but I don't see anyone proposing jailing women for risking toxoplasmosis.

[Durandal]

Durandel, the relevant line is:

And once a woman is pregnant she shouldn't be changing her cat's litterbox, either, but I don't see anyone proposing jailing women for risking toxoplasmosis.

Ah, thanks. Anyway, the sheer scale makes that comparison simply insane. Only 2 of every 1000 babies born in the US are born with toxoplasmosis. Furthermore, there are medications which can reduce or prevent the effects in unborn babies. The damage from alcohol or cigarette smoke is, as far as I know, irreversible.

[Darth Wong]

This is what's so aggravating about any discussion involving regulation of a harmful activity; people invariably assume that regulation of an extremely harmful activity with no particular social imperative must invariably shove all of society down a slippery slope toward regulation of any even slightly or marginally harmful activity regardless of the social cost, and then they argue on the presumption that you support and agree with this slippery slope fallacy.

[The Third Man]

I can see the logic and follow the duty-of-care reasoning, but I'm not altogether comfortable with this idea. I think this is because, if we introduced legislation as described, we would have a situation where the safest option for a woman who wished to remain within the law would be to abort any pregnancy that didn't arise from a meticulously planned conception. I wouldn't be happy with a rule that tends to encourage people to opt for abortion - and the associated risks to the mother - as the default reaction to a pregnancy. (Not least because if this was in fact the case, you'd all be denied my contributions to this board )

Purely in duty-of-care terms, I have another area I'm not sure about. What we are saying here is that it is OK to commit actions that have the potential to cause harm, so long as we have a viable plan in place (in this case an abortion) that we intend to implement at some future point to ensure that the harm never comes to pass. Would this fly? Although I think so, I'm not expert enough in such matters to say for certain. To resort to the hypothetical civil engineer who pops up regularly in DofC threads, is it permissible within the relevant professional code to knowingly design and construct a bridge that would likely collapse and kill people, provided we intend to blow up said bridge before anyone can use it?

[Darth Servo]

I can see the logic and follow the duty-of-care reasoning, but I'm not altogether comfortable with this idea. I think this is because, if we introduced legislation as described, we would have a situation where the safest option for a woman who wished to remain within the law would be to abort any pregnancy that didn't arise from a meticulously planned conception.

How do you figure? An unplanned pregnancy usually produces just as healthy a baby as a planned one.

This is about minimizing risks. Take the example of the cat box mentioned above. Even IF it were as dangerous as drinking to a fetus, the woman COULD get her husband to do it.

I wouldn't be happy with a rule that tends to encourage people to opt for abortion - and the associated risks to the mother - as the default reaction to a pregnancy. (Not least because if this was in fact the case, you'd all be denied my contributions to this board )

Name ONE post here that has argued for "encouraging" a woman to get an abortion.

Purely in duty-of-care terms, I have another area I'm not sure about. What we are saying here is that it is OK to commit actions that have the potential to cause harm, so long as we have a viable plan in place (in this case an abortion) that we intend to implement at some future point to ensure that the harm never comes to pass. Would this fly? Although I think so, I'm not expert enough in such matters to say for certain. To resort to the hypothetical civil engineer who pops up regularly in DofC threads, is it permissible within the relevant professional code to knowingly design and construct a bridge that would likely collapse and kill people, provided we intend to blow up said bridge before anyone can use it?

No one's trying to use abortion as an excape route for a messed up pregnancy. The argument is, if the woman plans to carry it to term she should be held accountable if she fucks the baby up through her own actions.

[The Third Man]

How do you figure? An unplanned pregnancy usually produces just as healthy a baby as a planned one.

I maybe didn't explain that too well. What I mean is that a woman who has thoroughly planned her pregnancy would have taken the precaution of giving up the booze and cigs well before the actual conception. A woman who hasn't planned is one day presented with a surprise positive pregnancy test. "Ooo-errr" she says to herself, "I got preggy sometime in the last 6 weeks, and I'm not altogether sure just how much I've drunk or whether I smoked in that period." So, to avoid the possibility of being prosecuted for possibly harming the unborn kiddy, her logical best option is to get rid of it, and claim she was planning to abort all along, rather than doing like my old mother did and sensibly going ahead with producing yours truly.

Hopefully that's a clearer explanation and should clear up your other objections to my post.

[Darth Servo]

Well, if there is nothing wrong with early term abortions, whats the matter with the woman getting one?

[The Third Man]

Well, if there is nothing wrong with early term abortions, whats the matter with the woman getting one?

There's nothing morally wrong with early-term abortions (IMHO), but there is some risk to the physical and psychological health of the mother. Not that those risks are usually an issue, but I don't think it's acceptable to legally pressure a pregnant woman to run such risks just because she is unsure whether or not she may have drunk or smoked during the very early stages of her pregnancy.

[Darth Servo]

Well, the point is to not legally pressure them to get abortions. Its to discourage them from drinking, etc while pregnant. Do you hane an alternative plan?