Should it be okay for women to smoke while pregnant?

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A lot of american right-wingers think that compulsory schooling is part of a "communist conspiracy" and think that government oversight into homes schooled children's academic progress and overall well being constitutes a violation of parental rights.("we parents got the right to raise our chilluns without state interfearence!"). Absolute bodily freedom versus total state control, which is what people like XFG, ruveyn, and others are advocating is a false dichotomy and I certainly *hope* they realize this.

People are basically selfish and the more freedom you give them the more they have the opportunity to pursue their own interests at the expense of others(INCLUDING future generations and persons-which include the unborn) and worst of all, to behave in an irrational self-indulgent manner at the expense of a person-to-be: Like smoking, drinking, and getting high while pregnant. It's appalling how much faith libertarians(like ruveyn of course) have in humanity.

But don't forget that the government is made up of people, so it too suffers from the basic flaws of humanity. This is why it is so important to respect the individual and to come to general consensus on issues like this.

There will always be restrictions on freedoms; there has to be or we would be in a state of brutality and chaos. But when it comes to my own bodily functions, I don't think others have a right to interfere.

No, it's actually worse than that. "Rights" simply do not have coherence, and any effort to devise the bright-lines that would allow them to make sense in the first place is doomed due to a large set of problems.

Even further, because rights are continually invented throughout the course of history, it becomes absurd to take rights language as a serious reflection on reality or substantively true.

Finally, any effort to fix "rights" into something functional(if it even could be done) is going to include a WHOLE LOT of appealing to the consequences. So, do people have a right to the things they make or earn? Sure, on the face of it, they have a right to it. So, let's say that there is a conflicting right to healthcare. So, we implement a healthcare system, but in effectively cares for one person. Arguably then that's a rights-violation, as it doesn't help one right at the cost of another. How about 95% of people? Maybe that works. Can we implement one that will work for 100% of people? No, probably not, because there will always be implementation problems, systems never work at 100%. So, we end up having to calculate consequences of our policies in order to determine whether rights are actually being honored or not. Is this a problem? Well, sure if you want to argue that consequentialism doesn't work due to consequences, then rights-language either gives you no grounds to make a policy(as rights needing enforcement are only honored to a degree and this degree varies and isn't known in advance) or it forces you into the contradiction of denying the validity of consequentialism while still using consequentialist justifications.(by having cops we can reduce rights-violations by X%)

So, the trick is that you're trying to make sense of something fictional and ridiculous in a complicated world such as ours.

Even worse, I could end up saying: "A person who comes into existence has a right to a body that was well-maintained throughout pregnancy". This seems potentially valid, in that it involves no contradictions, it addresses the moral inclinations of the people who are against smoking and drinking during pregnancy, and it parallels statements that other people have made about rights in the past. I didn't go down this direction because I think "Rights" are nonsense. I couldn't even affirm *that* bit of folly because of the real world problems.


Do we have to have "rights" to express the notion that individual freedom is a good thing? I would think that other moral expressions more prone to flexibility would be better. After all, a "right" is hard to consider something to be violable, but other notions can be violated even if they provide substantial moral weight to individual freedom.

Also, come off of it, judging the greatest good isn't an outright crapshoot. People do it all the time. So, when I go to my kitchen to get a sandwich, I'm clearly engaged in some low-level effort to determine what the greatest good would be, and implementing it by getting a sandwich. Also, nearly every single freaking policy decision HAS TO be heavily involved with questions of the "greatest good" because of the complex interrelations involved with the decisions we make. I already pointed that out. So, if you want an anti-crime policy, you can't stop ALL crime, but if you stop NO crime, then right is not honored, and if you implement a policy that stops an insufficient amount of crime per the cost, then you end up violating a right to earned resources without sufficient justification in terms of the right to protection(or whatever the heck you'd wish to call it)

Even further, consequences is simply how the world has HAD to work in many significant areas. Most policies that have ever been created have been done on the grounds of outcomes. Even the legal traditions we use often come in conflict with rights-notions for reasons that are justifiable.

So in this legal paper by Todd Zywickli, he talks about the rights-tradition of libertarianism in comparison with the consequentialism of common-law, and law and economics: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... id=2174534 (I may have posted it already. I don't intend for it to be mandatory reading, but I found it an interesting paper, and relevant in many ways.) At many stages he points out how a rights-conception of law(in this case libertarianism) has significant and fundamental problems making it not viable as a theory to implement, and also how this rights-theory often comes to obviously erroneous conclusions. Now, arguably some of these problems are just with libertarianism, but many of them are a problem with any rights-language, and libertarianism, as a theory of rights is a very well-developed one compared to most reflexive expressions.

Anyone here ever hear of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome for instance?

Seriously, the question is should we allow a woman to potentially screw up a kid for life due to the damage inflicted by drugs in the early stages of their development.

Because the fetus in the woman is her property.

And we should not agree to pay the woman for coverage of the medical consequences of her folly. Let her bear the burden as well as bearing the fetus.

ruveyn

Read the thread, 'Yasha. It has come up several times (though not in a way that would support your point).
*********
Another interesting topic, touched on tangentially: should people who are carriers of serious genetic diseases be allowed to reproduce? There is a family local to my hospital where the parents found, after their first child was born with cystic fibrosis, that they were both carriers for that disease. They were counseled to either use genetic screening for future pregnancies, or to avoid having more children. They declined both, deciding to leave it 'in God's hands,' and they now have four children, all with cystic fibrosis, all of whom will probably die before 30.

Should the state be empowered to prevent such children from being born, and therefore from leading lives filled with suffering?

What about Down's syndrome children? What about the children of fathers exposed to agent orange (which, by the way, is being re-considered for legalization in the US)? What about any negative condition of the zef/infant that requires something other than taking control of a pregnant woman's body away from her?

Interesting thought: Could a virus be built to target the worst genetic anomalies and force a spontaneous abortion in those instances? (I don't know enough about biological viruses to tell. I just know that in computer viruses, we have done some very amazing things in selecting a target and destroying it.)

If so, then it would provide a minimally invasive way to prevent these situations, as we've mandated shots in many situations, often vaccinations as mandatory for compulsory schooling. Instead of some more extreme legal solution, we just mandate the virus.(Assuming there are low costs per marginal unit of virus)

I mean, a question does come up on whether newborns are persons or simply just newborns as well. There are some lines of evidence that suggests they are not persons, and if so, then that gives a less invasive method to do it after birth. It's just that I haven't investigated the latter possibility because it's not a major debate in the US context, with the bigger debate being the much clearer one of abortion.

It just seems that a legal solution focused on identifying cases of potential genetic diseases, like carrier mate-pairs, is more problematic, so I'd have to push for another solution, or push that we accept the current situation. Especially since the greater concern is the untreatable ones that lead to poor life outcomes like cystic fibrosis, rather than ones compatible with a decent lifestyle, and the really bad ones are likely relatively low prevalence in the population as they are selected against. (Note: If somebody has a good overview of the % of people born with a terrible genetic disorder, then that would be more interesting, as it could be my guesses on the matter are wrong.)

Stop giving taxpayer support to children who were best off let to be unborn. Stop enabling. Let the defectives croak. The alternative is to either become a tyrant and a policeman or to hang the burden of the ill born around the necks of the taxpayers.

Piece of advice: Toughen your brains, harden your hearts and stop being sentimental. Life is basically unfair, but fortunately it does not last more than 70 or 80 years in most cases. Sh*t flows downhill and 85 percent of everything is crap. Wake up and get with the Reality

ruveyn

What are the problems? I don't see how rights don't have coherence. I think acknowledging conflicting rights and considering them in decision making is quite a straightforward method.


I don't see how rights have changed much over time. Could you provide some examples.


I'm not saying to disregard consequences; I think they are part of a broader toolkit that also includes rights.


Rights don't always come at the expense of other people's rights.


True . . . the consequences of making decisions based on rights is unknown. However, that rights be respected is in itself a good thing.


Respecting rights is one of the ways to deal with real world problems. I believe it to be an essential one.


If there are no rights then there is no individual freedom. We would all subject to what is determined to be the greater good.


I'm not saying that we shouldn't consider consequences (although it is impossible to know for sure what they will be - you could cut your hand while making your sandwich.) But consequences shouldn't be the only determinant.


I couldn't download it, my computer gave me a warning. I will see if I can track it down a different way.

With regard to the original question, the fetus is part of my body and is subject to my discretion, not the State's.

Alright:
* One problem is in acknowledging when a being actually has rights. There isn't a straight-forward method, and our current legal situation inherently will violate the rights of some people, or give legal rights to people who are incapable of having them regardless of how it is cut.
* Another issue is in recognizing how a competing claim system works without abolishing the notion of rights in the first place. If my right to something is continually contested, then in what sense do I really have a right to it at all? I merely have a claim to it. Rights, by their nature, are promoted as something that cannot be justly violated or abridged.
* Real world problems very rarely actually come out in a manner that is coherent within a rights-framework. So I recently posted a paper on here about that, but there are lots of varying issues. So, does a right to property entail that you have the right to not have the value of that property taken away? In many senses, yes. Ok, does air pollution count? How about pouring toxins upstream a river that you end up owning part of? Blasting music loudly outside your property? Quietly outside of it? Shining bright lights out at all times? Pointing a laser pointer at it. What if mine underneath your house, is that different than if airplanes fly over it, and how so? What if my mining causes damage to the house above it?

The issue is that for any formal definition you try to give, there is a potential defeater that falls completely outside of the desired good of the formalism created to understand the problem, such that either a harm is allowed that would ideally be disallowed, or a harmless thing is considered a rights-violation, or an absurd answer is obtained, or an indeterminacy exists. And various rights-promoters have noticed these issues, and the standard responses tend to differ from person to person, or to include so many exceptions as to be meaningless, or to simply involve wrong answers. So, a right to the fruits of one's labor is an issue. If I create a farm, I've improved the land. What if I just put food coloring into a body of water? Is that improvement? How about if I give birth to a child, surely that's gotta be labor, so do I own the child? Do I necessarily get mineral rights? And the list actually continually goes on and on and on for most notions people ever put forward about rights.


The right to privacy is a result of the gain of privacy of the middle classes in earlier stages of capitalism. Earlier societies didn't really have much privacy at all. The right to privacy, while often considered a right in our common speech, actually isn't an explicit right in say the US Constitution, and some legal scholars(like Robert Bork) have come out against it.

The right to religion is largely a result of religious conflicts that occurred in Europe and the desire to set a situation up to avoid these problems in the future. Most societies have not recognized this right at all.

FDR, a major American politician, actually is known for considering a 2nd Bill of Rights:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights

These include a lot of things that many people don't consider rights at all, and that were clearly historically not considered rights. If accepted it would amend the notion. Many people would accept what FDR promotes as rights. This is a problem, especially if we want to be able to give a full factual account of the set of rights that exists.

How about the debate between negative and positive rights?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_a ... ive_rights So many of both sets of rights are inventions that were not considered in earlier societies. And in our society, some debate exists over whether positive rights are actually legitimate or not. Some of these positive rights are not historical rights. (This ties back into FDR's 2nd Bill of Rights) So, if we go either direction a significant change occurs.

And yeah, women's rights as a category really didn't exist until the advent of Feminism, when many women started promoting the validity of this notion. Before then, rights were presumed to only belong to men.

And... slavery is also an area where our notions of rights have shifted. In earlier ages slaves were considered ok, and many philosophers have offered a defense of slavery. Now we consider slavery a rights violation. The problem being that it had to either never be a rights violation or always be one, and historical shifting doesn't lend us a lot of credibility to our methods.


Except my point is that rights require large sets of consequentialist thinking, and if they DO, then this means a) consequences can reasonably be considered, a point you denied earlier, and b) given how I expressed the framework, that notions of rights ultimately end up being a very confused consequentialism given the existence of rights trade-offs.


A large set arguably do though. Especially given how "rights" is so poorly defined. Many people believe that religions have a right not to be criticized, and this would conflict with a right of free speech.

Or how about free speech? Either free speech can be punished by the right of free association practiced by employers, stripping it of much of its validity, or the right of free association practiced by employers has to be stripped to maintain free speech. And a potential list can go on and on and on of conflicts.


Except that rights aren't really respected by a law that doesn't effectually uphold that right. So, if my anti-crime measure only stops 1 crime, then... that doesn't work. However, we don't really have a cut-off point for when it works and when it doesn't work. So, what's the crime/dollar ratio before we start saying "This program upholds a sufficient level of the right to protection for it's sacrifice of the right to earned income"? If rights really exist, there ought to be an objective answer. If rights do not exist, then we'd expect more flexibility, more debate, and a certain degree of lacking clarity.


You believe incorrectly then.

The list of problems is actually very significantly large. I'm just trying to scratch the surface. The issue is that if there are some really tricky problems and some areas where rights just don't make very much sense, or where we can't really justify them fully, how seriously ought we take the framework? Our background knowledge isn't giving us strong reasons to think that we have a full and complete moral function within our brains that can really handle all of the grays effectively.

So we may have some reconstructed notion of rights at the end of it, but it's not going to be at all the simple notion we started with, it's going to be violable and potentially overwritten by compelling reasons from other ethical systems, and so on.


That's incorrect, and obviously incorrect.

1) Many people have justified individual freedom AS the tool serving the greater good. In fact, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises were both known for promoting a very extreme freedom-oriented framework, but frequently justifying themselves through utilitarianism. David Friedman(son of Milton) is actually a utilitarian anarchist with many criticisms of a more rights-based framework.
2) The set of possible ethical system is MUCH larger. So, think about virtue ethics. Virtue ethics seeks a virtuous society, so it justifies policies not by the greater good, but rather by the promotion of virtue. In this, it's both NOT a rights-based system, OR a greater good system.
3) Combinations between multiple ethical frameworks are possible, and I've suggested the idea in the past in this thread(if I remember correctly). So, let's just say that we have a system where freedoms are generally upheld, BUT if the cost of exercising a particular freedom in a particular context is too high(according to another non-rights-based ethic system) then the freedom is denied. So, let's say that people have the general freedom over their bodies, so they can eat junk food, smoke, drink, take marijuana, etc, but they CANNOT take cocaine because cocaine is believed to be too degrading to the human being. Do people have freedom in this system? Generally yes. But, it's not a rights-based system, it's simply a system that favors individual freedom while allowing other ethical ideas some sway.

Technically, the current system of most societies IS a more blended system, and one lacking anything like a full right. So, if you look at most rights, legally there are certain exception cases where these are no longer held as valid, and these exception cases are held because of some other ethical considerations that are generally NOT rights-based. So, "You can't yell out fire in a theater" is not focusing on whether yelling out fire violates a right(it really doesn't) so much as consequences, but a system with that rule, while not really having full rights can still have individual freedom.


I think you're now engaging in a bit of a hedging action. What I mean by that is that there is some degree of waffling over the systems, so.... you're promoting that rights-only is the proper ethical framework however, you're justifying a rebuttal by saying you're rejecting pure consequentialism.

The problem is that this balancing act doesn't really give much of an analytical structure. If you want rights+consequentialism, then you'd have to acknowledge that there are certain cases in which a person's right over their body can be abridged, even if you don't consider those cases realistic. If you want pure rights, then you can't just rebut pure consequences.


But the future person is relevant to the state and the larger society. If you were simply going to abort it, there is no need for this question. However, because you're impacting another person(the fetus after development) and other bodies of actors(the state and society) there is a real concern and realm where their discretion is relevant.

Even in a rights-framework, the second that something involves a party other than yourself, there are real concerns. Smoking and drinking during pregnancy does involve another party to these actions. Although there are some oddities in this particular case, we can actually identify this other party, and potentially express a rights-notion that is similar to other rights notions put forward as relevant to this situation.(But as I said, I'd rather move away from considering this as a matter of rights. If we have "rights" that are violable when the time comes, then they're not really well-encapsulated by the term "right")

Who ya callin' sentimental? You may not like the idea of having to bear the "tax burden" to care for the ill born, the disabled, and civilizaton but thankfully you don't have much of a choice, boychik. I gave a perfectly rational reason why women should NOT be allowed to do irrational, stupid things while they're pregnant(and who intend to keep it)that will cause harm to the person-to-be. When what you do has a direct negative affect on future generations and future persons then it's rational for the law to put a stop to it. I don't effing care if you don't like it or if it makes you butthurt like XFilesGeek. You can't do whatever you want with your own body: Hence the reason why raped and murder are unlawful.

Stop trying to pretend that you are 100% rational and projecting your own sentimentality onto others. It just doesn't work.

You cant force them too. Oh and what about the fathers of said children? If their doing these things, it still affects them before and after birth.

Rights are abridged all the time. This doesn't mean they don't exist. Rights do compete.


None of these things even come close to my claim to my own body.


How is the harm determined to be ideally disallowed . . . and how could a harmless thing be a rights-violation? If it is a rights violation then it has caused harm.


It seems that accepting that people like women and slaves has been a forward progression. It has changed over time, but this has been a good thing.


There is definitely a mixture of rights and consequentialist thinking. As I said, one can never truly know the consequences of an action, but all we have is our best judgement so we have to use it. (Although, ultimately, it is a crapshoot.) But we are only human.


This is so true, at least in my case.


And this is a bad thing?


So individual freedom exists for the greater good. But what if an individual freedom comes up against a common good? That is where rights come in

Virute? I'm not sure what this refers to, but it sounds like a term open to a lot of differing views. Mine would be to respect yourself and others.

Agreed.


If it's a choice between rights and consequences, I'd go with rights.


I accept that, but not in the case of a pregnant woman. She has done nothing wrong. Getting pregnant is not a violation against anyone and she has done nothing that abrogates her right to control her body. You cannot separate the fetus from the mother - for a brief amount of time they are part of the same being.


Too bad.

I did state other things as relevant to my argument, and the case is partially cumulative.

My point here is that if something is so easily abridgeable, it's difficult to really say it's a right. If rights competition is a significant ethical factor, then I don't straight-forwardly have a right to do something. I simply have a presumption that I can do it that may be overwritten. The notion of a right is generally something that is rarely to never abridged.


You're mixing up arguments. This argument is that rights notions aren't conceptually coherent with a particular illustration. It's not directly related to the right over one's body. Are you conflating the issues to avoid an undesirable conclusion?

Even further, if we wanted to go further, how can we define "claim to your own body" in a manner that avoids all possible controversies? If you had a prosthetic limb, would that count? Does clothing count? Do vaccinations count? Do the fruits of your labor count? The issue is that no matter what direction you go, there's going to be gray areas and fuzzy issues. I mean, a standard answer to the vaccination issue is that the claims of society often trump the claims of an individual, so in the US, vaccinations are often required for schooling except if a good exception is considered to exist by the state. This is a violation of a claim over one's body.

Additionally, cocaine is outlawed in most nations. This is also a contradiction to the claim over one's body. So, to push this, does your claim over your body mean that cocaine needs to be legalized? Does it entail that prescription drugs all be sold over the counter? Does it entail that if you're suicidal that you must be allowed to commit suicide, and that nobody has a right to stop you? Does it entail that you have the right to sell your body on the street? Does this entail that if you have schizophrenia, we still cannot put you into psychological treatment without your permission? Does this entail that any and ALL economic regulatory policies are null and void because they demand that individuals do with their bodies things they would not do otherwise? Does this entail that you have the right to sell yourself into indentured servitude? And the list goes on and on, with all sorts of major and marginal issues, as "right to your body" is so big and vague that it could potentially apply to any sort of action or inaction. I mean, technically, an economic regulation in many ways does more to control how people act with their bodies than this rule on pregnancy might.


Well, if we're basically unsure with how to describe a rights-violation, some of the things we do describe will fail to actually be harmful. I think you're assuming that because we call something a right, we can somehow define it in the right manner without causing problems automatically, even though these lines are often problematic in practice.

Also, technically, a right can be violated without harm. So, if you have a right to privacy, and I still search you, (maybe I use a scanner that isn't allowed), and I find nothing, then it's really hard to say you were harmed by the search, but I still violated your right to privacy.(Not saying it's an actual right, but it's a very clear example) Other examples involving other rights can likely be brought up as well. So, in the Bill of Rights of the US, soldiers cannot be quartered in a home, but let's say that this happens anyway, and the entire experience ends up being a JOY for the home-owners, their rights were still violated, even though in the end the experience was much better for them than the opposite.


The original point is that these conceptions change. We call something a progression because we like it and believe in it, but us calling it a progression changes nothing in terms of the original problem. (And you ignored my other examples which were clearer in many ways)


It's really not an outright crapshoot.


No, it's a problem for a conception of rights that wishes to stop with "I have a right to X" and never recognizes the problems.


I'm rebutting this statement: "If there are no rights then there is no individual freedom. We would all subject to what is determined to be the greater good. "

My rebuttal still works, and your response makes no sense in context. It has nothing to do with the original discussion point.

Even further, your what if really doesn't actually prove that siding with individual freedom against the common good is a good thing at that point. Many ethical systems are centered on the common good. In order to assert that rights should trump, you'd need to establish the idea that the conclusion that rights-systems come to is always better than consequentialism, or that in the specific context, rights comes to a better conclusion than consequentialism. Neither is shown in this case.


It's not as open as it sounds. It's an ethical tradition that started off with Aristotle, and that's generally still held within the Catholic church. One can be a non-religious virtue ethicist though. There's a lot of questions with it, but your response is unrelated to my point. My point is that the set of possible ethical systems is much larger than "pure consequentialism or pure rights-based thinking".

"Respect yourself and others" really is not sufficient to constitute a virtue-ethics system. Think of virtue ethics as being focused on what it means to be a good person, and usually involves a larger and richer set of characteristics seeking to pull in a large set of virtuous traits, like generosity, prudence, fairness, etc, whereas other systems are focused on making the ethical decision. And because of that focus, these systems tend to emphasis character-building.


Your response seems to not make sense. Especially given that I've spent so much time talking about mixed systems and all of the rest, and you turned it back into a binary choice.

Even further, if it's a choice, then why does your opinion hold so much weight? In fact, why should your opinion be weighted above that of the presumed child? So presumably, no person would like to have birth defects resulting from poor choices of their parents, so why should the opinions of these parents matter more? After all, if we're just weighting opinions, and there is no fact to discuss, then it seems that these opinions would matter as well.


Umm.... I'm not sure how "she has done nothing wrong" follows.

Also, the problem isn't getting pregnant, the problem is getting pregnant, carrying to term, and engaging in actions that have a substantial chance of causing significant harm to the person that will result from the pregnancy. Getting pregnant is not wrong, but many people, including myself, are pretty adamant that it is obvious that mismanaging the health of another being, the person who will result from the pregnancy, is wrong. The desire is to make sure that the pregnant does not engage in this wrong act, and the abrogation is solely to prevent her from doing something wrong. So, any proposed rule is really mostly to address a situation where she has done something wrong.

Now, you can argue that drinking and smoking while pregnant are really deeply moral things to do, but.... I'd think the contrary is actually obviously right. The concern isn't about the fetus while it's still a fetus, it's about the person after that fetus leaves, which is something that we can reasonably think about and morally evaluate(just as we do for future generations of human beings, or for the presumed users of a product, etc. So, a person who uses a crib doesn't have to be alive when that crib is designed to potentially be a moral consideration when designing it. After all, very young children are often the users, and they are a very transitory set of people as they tend to pop into existence and then grow up.)


Yeah, too bad for autonomy. As, after all, rights are rarely considered to hold when another person can be harmed by an action. In this case, another person can be harmed by this action. Therefore, there is a case for intervention if this is too extreme to tolerate. As I already pointed out, we can design a rights expression in this case as well if we really wanted to.

Basically, your position seems more to be the unthinking re-assertion of "I have bodily autonomy", rather than any thoughtful evaluation of it. I think I've probably made my points with enough depth and at enough length to consider my point in being here as sufficient. I mean, I think I've been thoughtful. I've tried to put forward good evidence for thinking my way on the ethical aspects. Also, I think it's clear that I am not against human well-being in any substantive manner or motivated primarily by a hatred for women or an erroneous conception of life.

AG, as much as it galls, I could see your point, that ownership of the body is not absolute, a couple of pages ago; however, I have yet to see you resolve the level at which you think that the state should start to intervene. Before birth, as is the case with cystic fibrosis carriers? I'm not going to count your vaccine idea as an answer, partly because we do not currently have the technology and partly because it would require women to get dozens and dozens of injections to prevent carrying to term the most common genetic defects (wouldn't work against Down's and other chromosome duplications or deletions, either), and partly because the religious right would have an absolute aneurism and their heads would collectively explode.
...actually, the fringe benefits might make it worth the injections, now that I think about it...

Before a woman knows that she's pregnant? Should we forbid women of child-bearing age from ever getting drunk, unless she can not only present an ID showing her age, but also a government-issued sterilization card, like you show when you get a license for your dog, to get the spay/neuter discount? Should a woman who has no intention of getting pregnant at any given time, still be held hostage in her behavior to a zygote/embryo that probably does not even yet exist?

and, again, at what level can the state intervene even in late-stage pregnancy? Can it force a woman to involuntarily be cut open (c-section) if there is potential "fetal distress" on a fetal heart monitor? What if she wants to give birth at home, without a monitor? Statistically, home births have better outcomes for women (fewer major interventions like episiotomys and c-sections) and worse outcomes for infants (more stillbirths, more shoulder dystocias, more peri-natal infections, etc).

I really, really would NOT want to be an Ob-Gyn with a government minder on one side telling me, 'cut her open,' and a woman on the other saying, 'don't touch me.' At least in my state, current law is that touching a patient without their consent is assault and battery (not to mention so medically unethical that the very idea makes my skin crawl), at least until they are unconscious. If I were such an Ob-Gyn, I might well feel that my hippocratic oath precluded me from obeying the government minder.

After birth, even: when can we start intervening when parents inculcate their children into, say, creationist, polygynous, racist, or 'quiverful' cults? These things clearly harm the common good when more citizens believe in them, vs. fewer.

That it's abridgeable doesn't mean it's not a right. Rights come into conflict and a moral dilemma has to be solved. One's rights have to be weighed against the other's. In reading this thread I think there are two things being discussed: the morality of a mother smoking while pregnant and the restriction of a woman's behaviour by the state based on her being pregnant.


While I agree that it is immoral for a woman to smoke while pregnant, I do not agree that the state has right to alter her behaviour based on her pregnant condition.


The reason cocaine is illegal has nothing to do with the consumers state of pregnancy. This is the difference. When the reason for the law is the state of the woman's body, then it is invalid.


That's a whole other thread. But I'd say yes.


In this case the person is sick. Pregnancy is not a sickness. That is, you cannot base the commitment of a person on their being pregnant. She'd have to be lacking in capacity for other reasons; and I don't think smoking qualifies.


I don't think working can be compared to sovereignty over your own body.


I don't disagree that they are problematic in practice.


If a person is harmed in the forest and doesn't know it, is he really harmed? Yes, he has been. It doesn't matter if he knows it or not.


I know that our interpretation of what rights are changes, but this doesn't invalidate them. Slaves always had rights, even when we didn't recognize them. Did they know they were being harmed? (Well of course they did.) Our lack of realization at the time doesn't change the fact that they had the right not to be enslaved.


I wouldn't say that one is always better than the other; I have no way to know that. I would say that one without the other is not as good as both together.


Agreed.


The state does not have a right to control one's body based on her pregnant condition. The presumed child doesn't have an opinion and if it does there's no way we can now what it is.


Done nothing wrong and is not mentally incapacitated. These are the conditions for taking someone's liberty over their body away.


Smoking while pregnant does not abrogate a woman's autonomy over her body.


Potential doesn't trump existent. I'm here, the potential baby isn't. My rights are stronger. In this case, my right not to have public interference in my behaviour.


Never thought you were.