NickyJ
Retired Narrator
No, because that isn't being responsible when she has a baby.
At what point does a mother have a duty of care to her fetus?
- Thread starter aimeeandbeatles
- Start date
I think the actual duty begins as soon as she has the potential of being pregnant. Take maternity vitamins ahead of time, stop drinking immediately if the condom breaks, etc. Many women think they will abort, but then find that they won't when the time comes. It would be awful to poison a fetus if the decision to abort was aborted.
Dreadnought
Deity
Agreed. In my Psych class we're going over child development in the fetus. It's unbelievable what can affect the development of a child, especially in the first few weeks of development.
So government regulation is ok if it is to protect the children? Better tell Hermann Cain to get cool with the EPA.
NickyJ
Retired Narrator
The EPA has relatively nothing to do with pregnancy.
Do you want a pregnant woman breathing polluted air or drinking contaminated water?
GhostWriter16
Deity
First off, its absolutely impossible to divorce this thread from my pro-life viewpoint. Absolutely impossible.
Secondly, responsibility begins with conception, but irresponsibility varies with degree. If your smoking kills the baby, unless you had intent to kill, its manslaughter, not murder. If you don't do anything exceptionally stupid and miscarriage just happens, the woman isn't responsible.
Also, awareness plays a huge part. If the woman doesn't know she's pregnant, and no criminal negligence is involved (Basically, if she didn't know, but she definitely should have, she's responsible IMO) she shouldn't be prosecuted if the baby dies. If she was fully aware, she should be.
I agree in principle with El Mac, with the stipulation that responsibility is much higher if you KNOW you are pregnant than if you MIGHT be, and precisely how responsible you are depends on how likely it was you were pregnant.
Secondly, responsibility begins with conception, but irresponsibility varies with degree. If your smoking kills the baby, unless you had intent to kill, its manslaughter, not murder. If you don't do anything exceptionally stupid and miscarriage just happens, the woman isn't responsible.
Also, awareness plays a huge part. If the woman doesn't know she's pregnant, and no criminal negligence is involved (Basically, if she didn't know, but she definitely should have, she's responsible IMO) she shouldn't be prosecuted if the baby dies. If she was fully aware, she should be.
I agree in principle with El Mac, with the stipulation that responsibility is much higher if you KNOW you are pregnant than if you MIGHT be, and precisely how responsible you are depends on how likely it was you were pregnant.
I agree with El_Mac. Duty of care begins as soon as one knows that a baby is on the cards. For some women that will be when the discover the are pregnant, for others it will be even before conception.
G-Max
Deity
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As hard as this may be to believe, children are still people, and they have all of the rights that come with that status, including the right to not be poisoned or killed.
Whether embryos count as children or not is another matter.
Verarde
Pondering Wearing A Hat
I believe (skimmed the thread) that the moment the mother knows she is pregnant she is responsible for the child. That said, the father should also be responsible in the best way he can, i.e. support the mother, etc.
Narz
keeping it real
I can't say I disagree. You need a license to drive a car but any old dumbass can have as many kids as they want. Some people should not reproduce.
I have a duty to care for all the fetuses of the world.
(Except for those that will grow up to be stupid people.)
I'm not sure how much the mother's duty differs from other people's, and for what ways distinctions in this matter can be made.
(Except for those that will grow up to be stupid people.)
I'm not sure how much the mother's duty differs from other people's, and for what ways distinctions in this matter can be made.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Unless she chooses to abort, she has a duty to care for the embryo/fetus. The right to choose includes to the responsibilities of choice.
dIZZyBlIZZy
Batteries not included
You should, but that should not be mandated.
The original post brought up something that's always perturbed me. The issue of a murder conviction for an unborn child. The Peterson (or Petersen?) trial in particular. In a state and time where abortion on demand is legal, a man can be convicted of 2 murders for killing his wife. I infer from this (maybe incorrectly?) that if you want the baby it's alive, but if you don't it's a disposable body part. Can we have our cake and eat it too?
What about the women who choose to have the baby but give it up for adoption? Don't they have a duty to care for the unborn's well-being so the adoptive parents don't end up with a baby that has health problems ranging from asthma to fetal alcohol syndrome, or worse?
Most females have the potential of being pregnant around the age of 11 or 12. I'm sure you didn't mean to suggest that underage girls should take maternity vitamins...
It has a great deal to do with it. Poison the environment, and you poison the people. There are places here in my own province where you can't drink the water, comfortably breathe the air, and there is an unconscionable number of birth defects, kids born with diseases, and mothers advised not to breastfeed their babies because their own food and water supply is contaminated.
1) Human life should be protected
2) Murder is wrong
3) Death Penalty is wrong
4) abortion is wrong
Seon
Not An Evil Liar
When I said "choose to keep it," I meant not get it aborted
. However, if you were planning on giving the child away to an adoptive parent, I would say that there is MORE of a duty to make sure that the baby is born without defects as you would be responsible for another person's happiness.
EnglishCrusader
AYEEEEE
If having children required licenses, then your daughter would've been taken away from you since as a high school dropout (among other things) you are obviously unqualified to be a parent.
lovett
Deity
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This is surely too stringent. If this is the case, anyone (if female) who has had sex in the past few months, regardless of the amount of contraception they have been using and the fact they will abort a foetus, has a significant 'duty of care'. They are, you say, morally obligated to be teetotal, physically fit and full of specific natal supplements because of their duty to a possible foetus.
On what grounds do you possibly support such an obligation? It is not anything to do with making people's lives as good as possible, that should be clear. Although it is the case that some people do not abort although they thought they would, in some case we have people whom are absolutely certain that they would abort if they became pregnant. Unless you are committed to the belief that a foetus has a (valuable*) life from the moment of conception, no one's life is at stake here. If one aborts a foetus before it can be characterized as alive, and one is sure that that is the course of action you will take, that you take 'sensible natal precautions' has no effect on anyone's life. The foetus will never be a child whom would suffer from your actions. There is simply no life to be affected.
It seems you might be making a more epistemic claim; nobody is certain enough that they will have an abortion to warrant the risk. The risk here is the damage drinking and so on might do to a child. But this claim is false. Some people are very certain indeed they will have an abortion if they became pregnant. They may also, due to their use of contraception, be very certain they are not pregnant. The certainty they hold here is no less sturdy than the certainty we require to warrant other risks. In many cases, it may be more so. When I drive a friend (or a child!) to an appointment I am certain enough that I will not crash to warrant the risk. However, my certainty here is not absolute; it is definitely the case I could crash and greatly hurt both myself and my friend (or child). It is surely plausible that one could be as certain one would have an abortion/was not pregnant as one is that one will not crash one's car in a given journey. If the latter warrants taking a risk (and a greater one than the former; possibly killing someone) however could the former not?
I do not see any other plausibly justification one could use to support the obligation you propose. Certainly, we cannot claim that sex is an inherently reckless act and thus engaging in it bestows on one a special obligation. If proper precautions are used, and definitely if one has is committed to abortion in the instance of pregnancy, I fail to see how sex would be anymore reckless than driving my friend to his appointment.
A more plausible obligation needs to be much less stringent. It surely needs to be probabilistic; one has a duty of care to a foetus once there is a certain probability that that foetus will become a person. Your condition could be re-constructed as describing that 'certain probability' as anything above zero. As we have seen, this is unsupportable. The 'certain probability' may be fairly low, but should be in line with our other assessments regards risk, to ourselves and other.
*I do not think it necessary to assume all life is valuable. The life of a tubercle bacillus (tuberculosis bacteria) does not seem at all valuable. The life of some humans also does not seem value; I fail to see how the life of a human in an irreversibly vegetative state is valuable (it is certainly not valuable to them). A valuable life is surely one where the holder, at the very least, has some preferences. This is not the case with a foetus.
G-Max
Deity
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And this is... Alberta?
#1 is where you first err. It should state "innocent, sentient life should be protected". From this, your #3 and #4 collapse.
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