xiphias: (Default)
xiphias ([personal profile] xiphias) wrote2006-01-31 06:21 pm
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So, let's say that Roe v. Wade is overturned. . .

Fundamentally, it seems to me that, while the right to privacy IS a vitally important issue, there's a more fundamental right that Roe v. Wade protects -- the right to control one's own body.

There is quite literally no right more fundamental than the right to do what you want to do with your own body, to the extent that it doesn't infringe on other people. And that sentence, right there, sums up the whole abortion debate in one sentence. If you think a fetus is a person, then restricting access to abortion is potentially justifiable, because you're weighing the rights of two people against each other.

However, f you think a blastocyst is in no reasonable sense a human being, as I, for instance, feel, then a restriction of access to abortion is simply an example of an abrogation of the most fundamental right a person can have -- the right to their own body.

Restricting access to abortion to a woman who wants one is therefore a way of forcing her to work on behalf of a third party -- the fetus (who may or may not have legal standing.)

Could you make an argument based on the 13th Amendment therefore?

For what it's worth: I think that that any law in reference to abortion is inherently a stopgap measure. The only reasonable solution is technological: artificial wombs.

Fundamentally, what should happen is that any woman who doesn't want to have her body used as an incubator for a parasite, for whatever reason, should be allowed to have that fetus removed and placed into an artificial womb in which it could grow to term.

If a fetus does have any sort of legal standing, such a step would protect its hypothetical right to existence, without removing the mother's non-hypothetical right to control of her own person.

[identity profile] xiphias.livejournal.com 2006-01-31 11:59 pm (UTC)(link)
I was under the impression that a woman could carry a child to term, give it up for adoption, and then have her own records sealed so that the child could not track her down. I would say that something like that would have to be part of this theory, too.

[identity profile] msmidge.livejournal.com 2006-02-01 12:22 am (UTC)(link)
Adoptees can get the records unsealed, if they have a reason. I know someone who went to court to find out her birth parents' names because she needed to know their medical histories to help with treatment of her cancer, for example. She had no trouble getting the information.

[identity profile] blackthornglade.livejournal.com 2006-02-01 12:53 am (UTC)(link)
In the state I was adopted in (Illinois, arguably one of the hardest and most controlled adoption states), sealed records remain sealed. The *ONLY* exception that I'm aware of is for a medical condition that is life threatening...as in you have to *have* it before you can go to the courts to request they be unsealed.

Illinois *does* have a voluntary matching database that will either release medical records only, assuming the parents have entered it/approved it, or, if *both* sides want, will release contact info. Those are the only two ways.

[identity profile] jehanna.livejournal.com 2006-02-01 01:58 am (UTC)(link)
That is the theory, yes; but that is being challenged regularly. There are no guarantees. There are also other issues besides not being contacted. What if the woman was raped and doesn't want her rapist to have offspring by her, whether she ever had to meet them or not? What if she doesn't want to add to the human population of the planet? Personally, I think it's creepy to force her to yield up reproductive matter out of her own body to grow another person against her will.