Fetal Rights & Forced Medical Treatment: Your Opinion?

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You are saying that women enjoy the trials of pregnancy. Too bad you never tried it. It is surely suffering delivered by a parasite, whether that parasite is desired or not, and that is definitely punishment.

Whether they enjoy it or simply grit their teeth and bear it is irrelevant. The pain and travail of giving birth is not one party inflicting pain on another into order to impose his will on the other. That is what punishment is. Punishment is an intentional act. The pain of childbirth is an accidental feature or property of giving birth.

ruveyn

So it is not the fetus' fault? Are you serious?

Fault is a moral matter. Cause is not. Since the fetus is not an entity which can have intentions no moral quality can be attached to any action it does or the effects of such actions. Fault is blame and only sentient beings can be blamed.

ruveyn

If you can be punished by a blizzard, an earthquake, a lightning bolt or an avalanche or a tapeworm, you sure as hell can be punished by a parasite distorting your body and its functions for its own benefit. You are merely doing dumb things with semantics.

I have never heard that a disaster punishes. Oftenmost, they are said to strike. Punishment is strongly connoted with retribution.

inanimate entities (such as a zef) can be said to 'punish' in a metaphorical sense, and that language is seen in literature or descriptive writing. In a legal sense a zef cannot punish the mother, since it has no personal agency; in a metaphorical sense, it can. We can either agree that this discussion will only involve one sense or the other, or we can acknowledge that everyone else does not always talk in the same manner that we do and move on. Please?

Definition of punish from Merriam-Webster: 2 a : to deal with roughly or harshly b : to inflict injury on : hurt

Evidently the dictionary agrees with me.

Imagine being punished by a rock slide. It makes no sense.

here is another definition I googled:

2 a : suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution b : a penalty inflicted on an offender through judicial procedure.

People punish people. Earthquakes don't punish people. They might inure or kill them, but they don't punish them

ruveyn

That there are more than one definition to the word does not invalidate my use of one of them.

What is the point of bringing a life into the world when you cant even give it a life?

Life is full of strange and pointless experiences. Ask any masochist.

Perhaps hope is the point.

My wife and I have been dealt some serious blows financially in the last three years. We are impoverished, living in an area of the country that has very little to offer in upward mobility. We had our first child at a time when we thought we had everything to offer.

Our second child made us rethink the affordability of condoms.

We really don't have very much, and we're fortunate that we have friends who are extremely well-off who randomly give us clothes their kids have outgrown (which we, in turn, pass on to others in our situation). We went from a 5-bedroom house in an upscale neighborhood to a trailer where we just have nice neighbors.

And it's not like we're undereducated, unskilled, lazy rednecks. I have my master's degree and my wife has a degree in psychology. If we could have seen the future, we probably wouldn't have had children. It's just that the timing of our children coincided with a slow downward slide that evaporated the opportunities we once had in this area. The difficulty of selling property and the impossibility (no money, no credit) of buying property elsewhere prevents us from leaving at the moment.

And, you know? Our kids are perfectly happy. When we were homeless after selling our house, our son thought we were on a long camping trip. Four people packed in a cheap motel room for 10 weeks, you really get to know each other! When we did get our place out in the country, the boy was excited because, well, it's the NEW place. Despite lack of space, the kids have more than enough space to play, and they really just want to be with us. Our little girl took her first steps in this trailer. They're very happy, and they still get to see grandparents, family friends, our much better-off relatives, trips to big cities, going to the zoo, museums, and so on. We eat at the Mexican restaurant every time the mariachi band is there, so they understand there is a bigger world out there with a lot of different kinds of people. We give them every opportunity we can, even though our oldest is 2.

If our situation never improves, we can still hope in our own children that they can seek out opportunities for themselves to learn and grow. They may not have all the "stuff" other kids their age have, but it doesn't really matter right now. We can teach them what we know and about the experiences we had growing up and that the same opportunities still exist for them in their own education and experience.

I also know if the opportunity presents itself I can go back for a doctorate degree which will qualify me for employment in my particular area of expertise--as it is, I hold three part-time jobs, with EXTREMELY good hourly pay but too little clientele to really earn much.

I think MOST parents want their children to excel, to do/be better in life than they did. At the moment, our bar is set pretty low. But that doesn't mean that the situation is hopeless, nor that our children can't succeed where we didn't.

I grew up in the 1930's in Brooklyn and there were days when we couldn't afford the coal to keep the furnace going and we spent winter days in bed in blankets to keep warm. But we were clever and did all sorts of fun stuff and my mother was a great cook and we managed and the thought that we were poor simply didn't occur to us. Radio was primitive and there was no TV and once in a while we went to the moves which cost 15 cents for kids and we saw the Marx brothers and Eddie Cantor and Mae West. But we cared about each other and we were wanted. I'd hate to be an unwanted kid in those circumstances.