Since I never was pregnant, I do not have full expertise to judge how women feel about their fetuses. However, since I was a child, I detested an idea to have my own children. For me pregnancy and giving birth represents the end of my life where I can live for myself and fulfill my ambitions. Such a view may be wrong. However, since I do not want to ever get married and I do not have wealthy parents and I know about complications of having a child at the age of thirty-five or forty years and many other reasons (plus I cannot stand pain and I have lupus), I cannot see myself having children ever. In my view, a fetus is an alien parasite that grows in your body, sucks life out of your body, hurts your body while it gets out, destroys your body, possibly kills you and that are only physical stresses you need to get through. What about social stress? Who is going to pay for health insurance, rent, food, bills and other supplies? Where are you going to work? What work schedule you can work? When you will be able to work? Who is going to sit with your child? However, in light of reading for this week I learnt that different aspects I did not know before makes having a child scary.
Fetus rights frighten me. So should be any woman. In some state for women getting pregnant means loosing their rights to fetus. For example, according to an article “Not All Objefication Is Sexual: The Return of The Fetal Container” by Alison Reiheld, four states: Minnesota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, authorities can confine women for substance abuse because women are considered as a danger to their fetuses. Indeed, medical community agrees that drugs, cigarettes, many medications, and alcohol pose danger to fetus. However, taking into consideration that substance abuse and alcoholism often go hand in hand with poverty, we need to rethink how to help women with such problems instead of taking away their freedom by confining them and by alienating them from seeking medical help. Also, as usual women who had such addictions but quit will be first to be hurt by such laws. Prioritizing fetus rights that is only a bunch of sells over rights of a woman who is already living does not makes any sense because fetus is part of a woman and not a separate being. Moreover, allowing state government to prioritize fetus right over woman’s rights gives precedent of questioning abortion.
If we give rights to fetus, we very possible will take away women’s right for abortion. Proponents of fetus rights can argue that abortion is a form of abuse like alcohol or substance abuse that harms fetus. At the same time, contraception that works for one hundred percent does not exists. So we get to a point where if a woman has sex she has to be ready to serve as an incubator for nine months with other responsibilities for many years. However, Adrianne Asch said in “Will we need to have abortion in utopia?” “the society that validates many different kinds of lives cannot insist that all women and men should find parenting rewarding.” So for American society that is obsessed on capitalism and democracy valuing any life cannot take rights from women when they reach their puberty and making them incubators.
As long as fetus stays inside a woman’s body, it has to be treated as any other woman’s organ. When a baby is born, he or she gets his or her own rights.
Anastasia,
I agree with you that “fetal rights” and the “personhood” debate has been very problematic for women’s rights. When does the state have the right to protect the fetus? Never, some would argue. Others argue the opposite. All of it though is a way to erode the rights that women won with the Roe v. Wade decision. The “personhood” side wants people to start thinking about fetuses as actual people, with all the rights that living people have, which of course would then make it harder and harder for women to justify abortion. All of the TRAP laws (we’ll learn about this today) are also efforts in the same direction.