Should it be okay for women to smoke while pregnant?

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Hell no and I always find myself judging them when I see it and feel disgust and sorry for the baby and anger. I know I would be mad at my own mother if my own problems were caused by my own mother smoking while pregnant with me and would never let her live it down, same as if she did drugs. I would be blaming everything on her for my disabilities.

How can that baby afford Marlboros?

Thank you.

1. Correct.


2. Incorrect.


It is your right to decide whether or not to abort or carry the fetus to full term. But if you choose then latter then your right to consume substances during pregnancy must be suspended.

A woman's rights to bodily autonomy cannot be suspended just because her actions make her a less-than-ideal incubator for a fetus. Her body still belongs to her.

Sure they can. If she decides to keep the fetus then there are certain limitations that apply to her behavior. You may not like this idea, but it is perfectly rational.

No, it is not. My body is mine whether I'm sharing it - by choice - with another entity, or not. I know you're generally pro-choice, but you aren't carrying the principle through. Until the zef is born, it doesn't get legal rights to squat, and nor should it.

Yes, it's very sad when FAS kids are born (as stated earlier, FAS is significantly worse than the mere low birthweight caused by smoking). However, the only sure way to prevent any FAS births would be, as was already mentioned, to treat all women between the ages of 12 and 50 as 'pre-pregnant' and forbid them from drinking to inebriation, because the damage of FAS happens before many women even know that they're pregnant.

You're basically saying that women's role as potential broodmares supersedes their rights as adult human beings.

I don't get why this right would be suspended. Again it comes down to my rights to do as I wish with my body against those of the potential life. I'm already here. I have the superior right to something that doesn't equal me and is using my body to feed itself.

I know this sounds harsh, but as was said earlier, women aren't brood mares - they're people.

I never implied the negation of the statement that women are people just as much as men are. But that doesn't change the fact that when left to their own devices, people are destructive and need to be controlled for their own good as well as for the good of others.

AspieRogue, are you pulling a Poe?

I'm actually not.

Really? I don't do that to my mother and she smoked while carrying me. She even got drunk one night before she realised she was pregnant. What would it achieve exactly to constantly guilt trip your mother for things that might not even be her fault? I'm sure my mother feels guilty all the time, anyway - without me adding to it. What's done is done.

Last edited by puddingmouse on 15 Nov 2012, 3:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

The parents buy them for the baby and I know this may sound morbid but I picture this baby lighting up a joint and listening to sublime! [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEYN5w4T_aM[/youtube]

Nope. Her body, not yours. You don't get a say in what she does with said body. You never get a say. You can't order her not to smoke, you can't order her not to drink. That's the bottom line, end of this discussion. You can bicker and wail all you want about it, but you don't have the right to control other people.

Even if a doctor did tests by the time they find out any damage would likely already have been done, plus not everyone knows that they are pregnant right away. If your period is irregular you may not notice it's late right away. You could easily be 1-3 months before you know. I've even seen tv shows where women didn't know they were pregnant as long as up until they went into labor. There was one I saw that had always had irregular periods and had been in a bad car accident and just though her symptoms were related to her accident after many negative pregnancy tests. Then one day she falls and has pain and thinks she hurt herself and goes to the hospital and finds out she is in labor.

It's not like you can go around stopping people from drinking or smoking if they are female and appear to be pregnant (and how many time would that "pregnant" person turn out to just be fat or have a medical condition that makes their stomach swell? I'm on a hysterectomy forum and have seen plenty of posts where they were asked if they were pregnant due to post surgical swelling or presurgical swelling from their condition.) Plus it's not like you can stop people from doing what they want in the privacy of their own home.

But it's a question of how much control the state can take over a person's body.

It's a fallacy to think that having a baby is always a good thing. There are some people the world would have been better off without.