What About the Dad?Follow

Even if the fetus was perfectly well formed, this is a grotesque science experiment. The woman's corpse is deteriorating. She's a gestating zombie right now.

Brain dead is dead. Even the coroner has issued a death certificate.

This is like the ultimate governmental intrusion.

The woman was about 3 months pregnant when she went brain dead. She could legally abort at that point. The husband is left high and dry in respects to his rights concerning his not-yet-a-child child.

I wonder if at that time if a DNA test was done to determine that the dad was indeed the legal bio dad, if he could have ordered an abortion?

The woman was about 3 months pregnant when she went brain dead. She could legally abort at that point. The husband is left high and dry in respects to his rights concerning his not-yet-a-child child.

Husbands have no rights in regards to unborn children in this or any other circumstance. Nor should they. If children were gestated in robots, neither parent should have the right to abort the process, the reason women have this right is because it is unavoidably a woman's health issue and the importance of control over their own bodies sometimes is more important than the right of an unborn child to be born.

I think this is perhaps the one circumstance in which a father does have 100% rights over the unborn child. 1. The mother is dead 2. They were legally married 3. He is trying to carry out her wishes as explicitly stated in a legal document.

It's only the hospital that went crazy with this law, which will hopefully be struck down as a result of this case.

The paternity is not in question.

No, abortion is an issue of choice. That's pretty clear.

No, abortion is an issue of choice. That's pretty clear.

Yeah, no. Not legally, not ethically. Only in slogans.

No, yeah.

You know as well as I do that a woman can choose to get an abortion without any medical reason - without even the pretext of a medical reason.



Edited, Jan 24th 2014 6:01pm by Elinda

I disagree.

A woman always has the right to control her body. Whether or not it's 3 weeks into a pregnancy or 8 months is largely irrelevant. If we're going to treat women as persons, they need to be given the agency to actually act as persons. Requiring women to remain pregnant, in any circumstance, fundamentally erases personhood by treating them as broodmothers. It's essentially a slavery situation on a micro scale - we accept a scenario in which women have rights, but we make those rights conditional to the service of another.

Plus, I don't agree with you re: abortion in tank scenarios. If a fetus is 4 months along and the parents decide they don't want to be parents, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to abort that pregnancy. It's not a person. It doesn't have rights to be born because it has the theoretically capability to actually be born.

Maybe there is a point where a fetus attains personhood, and it attains the right to life. And, sure, if that's the case then the parents couldn't abort it (since abortion wouldn't be an act of agency on part of the woman to control her own body).

But, personally, I don't think the actual state of personhood is developed until a fair bit after birth. I think we set birth as a convenient time for personhood to be considered, because actually marking the specific moment a baby becomes a person isn't realistic, and there are additional social reasons (like developing relationships) that make personhood-at-birth desirable as a policy.

Either way, in this situation, the question is relatively simple for me. If you believe that a person has the right to control the fate of their bodies after death (and trust that this woman's family isn't ************** then she should be taken off life support. If you don't believe that, then you already have your answer - the state/hospital can do what they want.

Or maybe you think that the person's wishes don't matter, but the family's do. Then you have the answer that she should be taken off.

It's not really a complicated situation with regards to what the right course of action is. Legally, it doesn't sound too complicated, either. If they wrote the law such that an individual needs to be a patient for it to apply, it doesn't. If they didn't write the law that way, it probably does.

Whether or not you agree with that depends on where you fall on the flowchart. /shrug

Oh, don't be silly. Parents shouldn't be allowed to kill any children older than five.

Once the tribe names it, you're stuck with it.

You're supposed to marry them off at that age; only you can't because of government interference. Whatever happened to liberty?

That's a pretty nice straw man you've got there, gbaji.

Abortion at any time, for any reason is a pretty cornerstone tenant of the feminist movement, even when you're subscribing to lighter versions of it, and I wouldn't consider that a fringe group by a long shot.

And an argument by norms isn't really going to work in this case. Most women who get abortions get them earlier in their pregnancies, (because they don't want to be pregnant). But that doesn't mean they WOULDN'T get them in their 8th month, if that's how the scenario played out.

And 1 month or 5, the fetus still has no right to the woman's body, no matter how you want to split it.

We don't hold that the right to life supersedes the right to control your own body in literally ANY other case than with pregnant women. You can present me with a dying person, who just needs a simple blood transfusion to live, and I'm under no legal obligation to donate blood (something with a VASTLY less-invasive cost than pregnancy). It doesn't matter if that person is an infant. It doesn't matter if that person is my own baby.

So why should we pretend like a fetus, in it's 8th month or no, has the right to a woman's body?

Particularly when the practice is going to be so rare that this is almost never an issue a woman faces in the first place. Nearly all late term abortions occur because of severe medical issues. Nearly all women who would want to not be pregnant anymore would get abortions LONG before that.

Furthermore, the idea a woman shouldn't be able to abort an 8-month-old is even stupider, since the abortion process itself IS DELIVERY at that point. There are only two ways to get a fetus that large out of woman's body. If the baby actually has the ability to sustain life (as in no deformation), then a hospital can fairly easily manage that.

And when we get into the less straw-man range of, say, 6 months it's seems increasingly obvious a woman should be able to abort, no? I mean, that's 3 months of her life she'd be treated as a baby farm under the law.

This is going to be Castile v Mesoamerica all over again, isn't it?