When a Pregnancy is Unwanted...

[stevenleser]

43. I disagree completely. This is a debate I have had a few times with people.

Particularly when I bring up the topic of the hypothetical, as yet not-created (but from what I understand is under attempted development) artificial placenta.

Consider that if you could take a fetus as young as one month out of a woman's body and place it into this artificial placenta and it could be successfully brought to term, should a woman still have a right to abort the fetus instead?

There are competing rights here that become more clear when you consider an artificial placenta. As long as the fetus is completely dependent on a woman to live, giving her no choice but carry or terminate, the woman's rights to carry or terminate completely trumps those of the fetus or the father. That doesn't mean the fetus or father have no rights, it just means hers are overwhelmingly superior in that situation.

If you could take the fetus out of the woman's body at one month and put it into this hypothetical artificial placenta and it could be brought to term, that changes the dynamic of those rights. Similarly, once a fetus is viable, that also changes the dynamic of those rights, albeit differently.

The question I encourage you to ask is, exactly what rights are we talking about? To my way of thinking, in what we are talking about, the rights in question are:

Woman:
1. Control over her body
2. Right to decide whether to reproduce or not to reproduce

Fetus
1. Right to exist and continue to live

Father:
1. Right to decide whether to reproduce or not to reproduce.

I am concerned about a woman having control over her body and her rights whether or not to reproduce. As long as a fetus is nothing more than a parasite, the woman's rights, particularly control over her body, are clearly supreme. If the fetus is viable, it now has rights similar in importance to her rights in question. If you could take the fetus out of the woman's body as early as one month, not only would it then have important rights equal to hers but the fathers right to reproduce or not to reproduce also starts to approach hers in importance.

At viability, even with machinery the rights of the fetus to exist and the rights of the father start coming into play IMHO.