To consider the issue more seriously
Okay, more seriously ....
Asguard said:
im pro choice as well. That being said the choice is to either terminate the pregnancy or keep it.
In theory, yes. But the complication is that women become, under such conditions, mere factories again. Smoking and drinking seem obvious choices, but what of other circumstances?
If a pregnant mother falls in the shower, should the child sue her years later for failing to put those little grip-tape flowers on bottom of the bathtub? If she is held at fault for a car accident that causes a birth defect, should the child sue her for not having her tires adequately pressurized, or for driving at all°?
When my partner was several months pregnant, we attended a Floater concert (the Seattle
Alter debut) at the storied Graceland in Seattle°. A low, dingy room with a middling-at-best reputation, we should have foreseen the possibility of a fight breaking out. To the other, Floater is known among its fans for disdaining and even excoriating violence at its shows. This, of course, means nothing to those who might be seeing the band for the first time.
And, of course, a fight broke out in front of the stage. Apparently, some drunk moron did not take kindly to the security staff's intervention of his reckless moshing.
I caught a hint of motion out of the corner of my eye, and despite the strangeness of a fight at a Floater show, was moving before I knew entirely what was going on; it was something about the frenzied nature of the motion that set me off. Such as it was, I knew it was a fight before I knew it was a fight, and I also knew where we were in relation to the side door before I knew it was a fight. So I started moving my partner out of the way.
The bastard was a feisty one, though, and in surreal slow motion the fight arced across the floor, coincidentally following us until my partner was climbing a table to hop the rail into the upper section. The fight missed us by all of three feet.
Now, if that fight had landed on us, our unborn daughter could have suffered serious damage. Were that the case, should she sue her mother for going to a concert?
All of this tends back toward the issue I described with one word:
lawyers. While something like smoking or drinking seems obvious—e.g., widely available scientific advice—the principle justifying such a tort claim is not so specific. Willful endangerment is one thing, but negligence is a broader concept. I have, for instance, seen pregnant women wearing high heels. Personally, I think that's crazy°, but I'm not the world's arbiter of sanity. Still, though, it is not impossible to conceive that an American lawyer could construct a case faulting a pregnant woman as negligent in prenatal injuries sustained when she sprained her ankle and fell against a parked car on a city street.
To reduce the mother's
choice to "either terminate the pregnancy or keep it" becomes problematic. While you and I might agree that, having decided to carry to term, parents owe that decision careful consideration, I cannot ask a pregnant woman to sequester herself until birth and recovery. It took my partner
months to recover, and were it not for her overriding desire to get back to taverns and hanging out with her cokehead friends, her theoretic seclusion from conception to recovery would have been something over a year.
Additionally, her psychiatric state wavered throughout pregnancy. As furious as I am about the infamous night I discovered I had a child on the way, the sheer irrationality of her drunken rage went well beyond her usual conduct when intoxicated. Judging by the subsequent months of irrationality that exceeded her normal degrees, I must necessarily acknowledge the possibility that her behavior was driven by aspects of her pregnancy°.
Compared to other horror stories I've heard, though, I think I might have been a lucky one°. And, in honesty, she was never quite the same. Her psychological decline continued as one might expect from excessive use of alcohol punctuated with occasional cocaine binges.
However, what this suggests is actually a psychiatric defense against the tort claim; we cannot, after all, expect people in certain states to decide and behave rationally. The result of that, though, would be a distasteful generalization that pregnant women are incapable of rational thought and behavior. I cannot abide by such a presumption, both in general and, if we need to be specific, because it undermines the woman's ability to choose abortion or birth.
Like I said, it becomes something of a tangled mess; technically, we're still on the point about lawyers°.
However, from the point of lawyers, we've also reached the issue of choice. And from here we also approach considerations that resemble a train wreck. What does that choice demand? In the end, facing up to fifteen months of isolation in pregnancy and recovery, the mental health toll on women could be disastrous. And facing such possibilities, what of the ratio of planned to unplanned pregnancies? A central argument of the pro-choice politic is that every child should be a wanted child, and this means a certain amount of planning. Facing reduction to breeder status for ten months, plus the debility of recovery, what effects can we expect on the mental health of mothers, and how will that affect both her parenting ability as well as her familial relationships?
Perhaps in Australia, such claims can be constrained to obvious things like tobacco and alcohol, but I have no such confidence about the United States.
The political logic of the outlook is, admittedly, somewhat cold toward fetuses. But I tend to stand for the child's rights upon its emergence into the world. As long as it is inside the mother, it is
her body and
her rights, not some arbitrary assignation to the fetus.
In the long run, it is possible that some theoretic construction might convince me otherwise, but in the meantime we would be opening Pandora's Box and inviting disaster to allow offspring to sue parents for prenatal tort.
____________________
Notes:
° for driving at all — I once had an enjoyable affair with a woman who had a son. One night, driving home, she suddenly needed to urinate. The subsequent conversation included details of pregnancy: "It's not so bad when you don't have a baby kicking your bladder," was how she explained it. So in our hypothetical, the baby gives a kick, the mother is distracted by the imminent possibility of pissing herself, and bang! she rear-ends the car in front of her. We should not drive when we take certain medications, and while there is no guarantee that a given pill will make you drowsy and slow your responses, the advice against driving is a safety measure. In other words, knowing a circumstance is possible ought—in theory—to alter one's habits. Thus, considering the increased chances of random nausea, kicks to the bladder, or even sudden hormonal surges that cause distracting physiological symptoms (hot flashes are not unheard of, for instance), and other possible detriments to one's ability to conduct a vehicle, should a pregnant woman be driving a car at all?
° Graceland in Seattle — In truth, I don't know what it was called at the time. It's been the Off-Ramp (a classic grunge fixture where Pearl Jam, under the name Mookie Blaylock, played their first show), Subzero, Graceland, and El Corazón, at least. I think it was either Subzero or Graceland.
° I think that's crazy — Then again, I think high heels are, in general, nuts.
° the possibility that her behavior was driven by aspects of her pregnancy — I have been known to joke that when people asked me how I coped with her mood swings during pregnancy, I shrugged and said, "I'm used to it." And, to a certain degree, that is true. The pattern itself was nothing new, though the magnitude and acuteness was something of a challenge.
° I might have been a lucky one — For instance, I once mediated a domestic violence dispute that started with what both parties claimed was a genuine accident. However, they were quite drunk, and the situation escalated to the point that their eldest son, all of eleven, ran across the street to bang on the door at one in the morning to beg my help. As things settled down, and I let them talk out their frustrations, the couple came back to good nature and related the story that apparently, while pregnant, she once went after her partner with a ten-inch kitchen knife. I never had to put up with that sort of thing during my daughter's gestation.
° technically, we're still on the point about lawyers — And we haven't yet considered the possibility of workplace injuries, either. Should a woman continue to work during pregnancy? Should she be held responsible in a tort claim if a workplace accident causes a birth defect? After all, while the employer might be held liable for the accident itself, what of the mother's decision to face the risks of the workplace while pregnant?
A note for Ophiolite:
I'm pretty sure I've written shorter posts than my initial response to the topic, even barring the deliberate and smugly humorous such as my prior reply to your inquiry, contributions to the "Political Cartoons" thread, hostile one-liners, and posts in "The Menagerie". However, I'm not sure where to start looking for them, so it seemed at the time worthwhile to offer a one-word denial. Please forgive my flippancy.