Yeah, while I think woman should have the right to choose whether or not to have a baby, once they choose to do so, I don't think it's unreasonable to enforce steps to protect the baby. Just like the state can infringe on your right to protect your kids once they're born.
However, I think this position is only morally defensible if the woman in question had a choice in the first place, aka if abortion and birth control are readily accessible.
Hm, it's all about how 'making a decision' is recorded, and when it takes place.
If it's early as hell, you can bet your ass local authorities & parents will try to strong-arm their pregnant teens into 'deciding' immediately. And that's -fucked-.
And opening any sort of dialogue on -when- this sort of 'physical body sharing' begins is risky as hell because you
know republicans are going to push for the most unreasonably early time they can.
But, there are cases where it's a really gray moral issue. Let's see..
The second case, in Iowa, did the mother state she had, in fact, thrown herself down the stairs? Did she intend to do so again? How far along was she?
In the Florida case, if she was 8 months pregnant (and the hospital knew what it was fucking doing) and she tried to leave during an obvious fetal medical emergency, should she be allowed to willfully endanger her fully-developed child?
And the sheriff that kidnapped the woman and took her to the hospital where she forcibly underwent a Cesarian- why did he do this? Was she binging on alcohol & cocaine while 9 months pregnant?
IMO I think a fetus ought to be treated as a human being at a certain point. About the same point where legal abortions stop in fact- about when the kid's brain starts truly functioning, 22-26 weeks into the pregnancy or just before the third trimester.
Here's some stuff:
http://www.svss-uspda.ch/pdf/brain_waves.pdfhttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Pregnancy_timeline.pngBut, just how the law handles the body-sharing and what a mother can or cannot do- delaying a cesarian, water-births, sky-diving- is so incredibly sensitive we might be better served by not addressing it at all at this time.
It would need mature law-makers to work on a case-by-case basis & create a rather complicated legal code- which mothers-to-be are able to understand.
And we just don't have those mature law-makers.