Should it be okay for women to smoke while pregnant?

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Not to continue a derail, but you're not listening. I'm not trying to say I can take on a SWAT team or out-shoot military snipers (though to be fair, I doubt most cops or military snipers could build their weapons from scratch either), what I'm saying is that I can lie low, plan and carry out actions autonomously, and remain undetected while doing so. The best soldiers in the world aren't of any use without a target, and I'm confident in my own ability to evade the notice of the police, in light of much personal first and second hand experience among other things.
That I'm talking about it openly on the internet should tell you how likely I think anything like open conflict is, but I'm tired of ignorant people making uninformed statements about the invulnerability of the state, and making foolish assumptions about how an actual revolt would be fought. You're from Washington, you remember what happened to Tom Wales? Anyone ever go to jail for that? No one is untouchable.

I have no doubt that a sufficient number of people using asymmetric modes of warfare can reduce the U.S. to an economic wreck and render us more technologically primitive than say, Somalia. It would be another Dark Age. Isn't that wonderful. Freedom fighters who fight dirty can bring us back to a pre-industrial state and we can all go back to eating berries and dried fish.

ruveyn

I can't see how anyone could be pro-choice and also against the right of a woman to do whatever she likes whilst pregnant.
I can understand the argument if it comes from someone who is pro-life, but I do not think such a restriction could be reasonably enforced.
Also, why stop there? Secondhand smoke is unhealthy for children, so should we remove children from smokers' homes?

Srsly? I'm not interested in listening to you continue to derail this thread with your childish, ego-stroking fantasies of insurrection against the US government. And lest ye forget, the rule in bold (also)applies to you, kid. End of discussion.

Last edited by AspieRogue on 22 Nov 2012, 2:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

My body an/or any parts of my body not being owned by the government and/or society outweighs any potential harm that could potentially be caused to a potential person.

The hideousness implications of "fetal rights" on women (and men) make me want to power-puke my Subway sandwich onto my keyboard.



Since I'm usually the one getting blamed for thread derailments I'm just going to nip this in the bud:

I couldn't care less about starting a "revolution." My position is, if The People's Imperial Republic of Wonks send the "pregnancy police" to drag me away to the gulag, I'm going to resist by any means necessary. This will likely result in my death, but death > enslavement in my personal worldview. I've never seen the point of sitting with your thumbs up your bum while some douche bag kicks your rights as a human in the nuts. Some people may feel differently.

If others want to follow my example, great, but I'm not the least bit ambitious and have no interest in bringing down The System providing that The System keeps its hands off of me.

Peace out.

Can't argue with that!


*exits thread*.

Exactly.

If you noticed, I never said anything about starting a revolution, I was describing more of a one man war. Your version is that the pregnancy police show up at your door, you shoot them, and then whatever happens happens; mine is that I don't wait for them to come for me and instead take the fight to them in the most advantageous way possible. What can I say, I'm a proactive guy.

Everyone needs hobbies, some people do the whole zombie preparedness thing, I prefer the dystopian state version.

Is it possible to be more technologically backwards than Somalia? All the same, I'd rather live in a Somalia than a North Korea, and I suspect you would too.

@ AG

I think a very good slippery slope argument can be made against virtually any law attempting to restrict the actions of pregnant women to protect their unborn children, based on the sheer number of things that could affect the health of the child, everything from too hot baths to improperly administered massage to various stressful careers. What's to differentiate all these risks into acceptable and unacceptable categories? I was just in fact reading Gabrielle Hamilton's autobiography in which she describes working double shifts in a slammed restaurant while 39 weeks pregnant, and between the heat of the kitchen, the myriad of possible accidents, and the general stress of the job, any number of things could have happened to have harmed her unborn child. Should she have been forcibly prevented from doing her job because of her pregnant status? And before you come back with "drinking and smoking are different than working", how about strenuous leisure activities, such as skiing or snowboarding, hiking, surfing, etc? Should pregnant women be forbidden by law from engaging in these completely optional activities in order to protect their unborn? How about poor nutritional choices? Jail for too many happy meals? I could go on.

I also happen to think that a law that applies only to women in this particular way would be subject to any number of Constitutional challenges, but that's another argument.

1) I don't like "rights language", this is more of a utilitarian calculation.
2) Your body and/or parts of your body not being subject to regulations isn't an unlimited set of harm, so that statement is incorrect.
3) Societies have OFTEN denied self-ownership in one or more ways. I've already pointed that out. So, there's conscription, drug-laws, and other social regulations. Frankly, I'd rather be asked to refrain from anything for a 9 month period than to be uprooted out of my life and conscripted and then put into some warzone. However, the idea of conscription isn't strictly off the table for a free society.(Although, I still do support a voluntary military)

In short: I don't see your position as holding a lot of validity given that the only policy option being considered is asking you not to drink or smoke for 9 months due to concerns about harm to another person, even though in say the US, you're asked not to smoke dope PERIOD which both seems to violate more freedom and have less moral justification. Some people are extremists, and they have extreme reactions to certain rules with insufficient justification, but their attitudes shouldn't define policy.

Couldn't this also be a matter of cost-benefit analysis? My thoughts on the issue is that the potential costs for a lot of these are low. Even further, additionally, from my understanding, strain isn't nearly as damaging as smoking or drinking, and that pregnant women were encouraged to be active for health reasons.

I mean, I can see how in practice a slippery slope could be created, but I do think that it could be avoidable. So, I'm not going to weigh it too heavily.

That being said, I can't say that I'm actually a really driven proponent of this idea. I've already admitted that LKL had an argument that could be sufficient against me. I'd wish for more information. (Maybe I should stop being so lazy and look up a data source on risks per trimester or something) Most of my point has been that I think the moral arguments people use and their rights-based thinking isn't sufficient given problems with rights-based arguments in general, and the fact that other ethical frameworks don't come to the same doctrinaire conclusion.


Right, and I'm not actually looking at it from that angle, as that's more related to the costs of implementing a law like that in the US, rather the abstract case for whether a law like that is desirable. It ends up getting pretty complicated if you go down that route anyway.

But this is all about rights. The fetus right, the mother's right, even the father's right. To solve this in utilitarian terms doesn't make sense to me. But, if I were to look at it this way, I could say that the greater good is achieved by giving people freedom over their own bodies, as this is more important that any potential monetary or health loses.


This is no longer true.

No, it isn't.



....which in no way implies that I agree with any of those laws. The fact that they exist doesn't make them "correct."



There is no "other person."



My reaction to not wanting to be a slave is in no way "extreme." Nor is my stance against eugenics, which is the inevitable consequence of making smoking and drinking while pregnant "illegal."



In other words, breeding should be illegal for diseased and/or deformed people with a high probability of passing their conditions on to their offspring.

After all, it's a simple cost/benefit analysis.

The problem is that rights-language is largely nonsense. It is either incoherent, incompatible with necessity, or undetermined to a degree that makes little to no sense, so maybe it's a support, but it's insufficient, especially if other views come out and have something to say. I've already made my statement on how this is the case, but I can do a copy paste of what I said earlier.

"Freedom over their bodies" isn't a 1 or 0. It never really has been a 1 or 0 at any point in the history of any society. So, what violations are bad and why? Is compulsory schooling an evil violation of the freedom of a person to do what they wish with their body, or is it permissible? Is banning cocaine a disturbing violation, or is it permissible? Is institutionalizing a schizophrenic a disturbing violation or is it permissible? Is stopping a murderer from killing a disturbing violation, or is it permissible? Is punishing a person for tax evasion a disturbing violation, or is permissible? I ask these questions rhetorically, because society has clearly come down on one side, and that's that a person's right to their body can be violated for a greater social good. (Arguably in the schizophrenic and the child we can argue that they are missing the proper agenthood, but.... we'd have to define this agenthood in a non-ad hoc manner)


Right, but in limited areas.

Yes it is. This principle has been established in a large set of cases, a person's autonomy can be violated for the sake of preventing a greater harm, and greater harms than the loss of this autonomy do exist.

Let's take the greatest extreme: A madman has placed a bomb in your body. The bomb is capable of destroying the world. You'd rather not let a bomb squad defuse your body, and you don't really care whether the bad outcome occurs. So, we have two options:
1) Let you keep the bomb and have the world explode and all life perish.
2) Defuse you against your will.

Now, if your autonomy is infinitely valuable, we'd have to accept option 1). The real world solution is option 2). The solution most people would consider moral in this situation is also option 2). The solution most people would consider to minimize harm is also very clearly option 2). You may feel violated, you may suffer maximal psychological harm, however, your maximal psychological harm is less than the loss of life in this other situation.


The fact that they exist implies that many people consider them valid options and morally acceptable.

If you consider them utterly morally unacceptable, then there are a few options:
1) You're uniquely morally enlightened
2) You're an ideologue.
3) You've developed a more thoughtful system than the average that refutes the morality of these institutions.
4) Moral discourse is so screwy that moral conversations are impossible.

I don't think 1) is true. I also don't think 3) is true, as you haven't shown a sign of depth in presenting your position.

That being said, I'm not really that concerned on what you agree with. Anarcho-capitalists think that taxation is literally theft so they seek to abolish the government. As a rights-based claim, theirs actually has a significant amount of validity and is an attempt to make rights into a coherent and cohesive notion, and more so than the claim that a person has a right to healthcare, as theirs can at least be universalized. However, the rest of the world considers this belief very nutty, and simply doesn't take it seriously and violates this notion of rights without regarding it. At this stage, I have no reason to think that your conception of rights is better than theirs(and actually some reason to suspect theirs is better), and I have no reason to take their conception of rights seriously enough to base society on it.


If you carry the fetus until it is born and matures, then there clearly is. My statement was clearly in reference to that possibility. Either you're confused on what I said, or you somehow don't think that a fetus even grows into a person. In either case your statement is incorrect.


It's pretty damn extreme given that I've put forward positions that the mainstream has considered reasonable and seen you denounce them as evil without evaluation.

Also, this talk on "slavery" is utter BS. Asking you to refrain from a purely optional activity, one that many people actually normally refrain from while still enjoying their lives, for a 9 month period, a period that you opted into by conception and/or failure to get an abortion, out of concern for the welfare of a future person(this isn't some pro-life screed, and concern about the environment is also often motivated by children who do not yet exist) isn't slavery. It has no relationship to the term slavery. Your use of the term "slavery" is simply incorrect. It may fail to be the correct policy and thus be undesirable for intelligent policy making grounds. It is an abridgment on freedom. However, the use of the term "slavery" in this context is simply intellectually dishonest.

Also, I don't think eugenics is actually wrong. It's a term that's received a lot of hatred because of the cruelties done for it in the early 20th century, however, eugenics is simply promoting "good genes". So, let's say that a tax incentive was given to high IQ parents to have more children. Is this evil? I don't actually think so. It may be an incorrect policy decision, but it's simply a tax incentive meant to encourage a certain behavior(that of having children) to a particular set of people. Given that it's not wrong for a governmental policy to discriminate on which people it seeks to target(whether race, gender, or income) then I don't see that as the hang-up. Given that it seems acceptable for a governmental policy to provide tax incentives for certain behaviors, including having children(many developed nations have incentives for having children) then I don't see how that would be a problem either. And given that it is acceptable for a government to promote social changes that it perceives as beneficial to the long-term welfare of society(providing values in schools, etc). I don't see a problem in principle.

Another instance of eugenics would also be genetic therapy. Genetic therapy works by changing the genes of an entity into "better genes", so that genetic disorders are avoided. This is actually also considered on the table as morally permissible and while we're not there yet, doctors are looking into it.


Hmm..... interesting thought. Probably much harder to evaluate though than smoking and drinking, as a person who smokes and/or drinks can simply be observed in the act. A person with bad genes has to be known to authorities to have bad genes. Genetic testing hasn't been extended out this far.

I mean, the only way to do this is to identify some genetic disorders as very harmful. Identify people who carry this. Identify the risk in each case. And then illegalize certain partnerings, or something along those lines. The problem is that we often don't know the carriers, the carriers may not know they are carriers, and the # of genetic disorders of a sufficient cost is probably not sufficiently high. I'm open to evidence on this though, and if in the future knowledge of genetics was more common before mate-pairings, then it may be rational to institute this, or to institute some form of more acceptable means of improving genes.

In this case, it may still be undesirable because by my best knowledge, the incidence of these disorders is lower, and the parties are less to blame and genetics testing is too expensive to make mandatory across a population.

That being said, I'm looking into the evidence for LKL's argument, and I think it's actually the correct stand, so now it's just a moral debate rather than a policy debate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alco ... rome#Cause So, basically while drinking is bad, the degree of badness is hard to determine, and often for fetal alcohol syndrome a major concern is heavy drinking in early pregnancy, which may be before the mother is aware.

No it's not binary. People have conflicting rights. It's a question of whose rights are strongest. That's where it gets tricky. But disregarding rights entirely would seem to me to be a bad idea. If the individual is sacrificed to the perceived common good then it's a slippery slope to gross violations against these individuals. Also, judging what would be the greatest good is a crap shoot. We don't know what the outcome will be and it could be far different than we expected.