Laws and Pregnant women drinking at a bar

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Drinking while pregnant should be a crime.

Attempting to enforce this would make enforcing an abortion ban look like a piece of cake.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Drinking while pregnant should be a crime.

Attempting to enforce this would make enforcing an abortion ban look like a piece of cake.

It seems to me that many people who are pro-choice are leaning towards option 4, which honestly I find puzzling, although probably I shouldn't.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Drinking while pregnant should be a crime.

Attempting to enforce this would make enforcing an abortion ban look like a piece of cake.

It seems to me that many people who are pro-choice are leaning towards option 4, which honestly I find puzzling, although probably I shouldn't.

I don't find it puzzling when I look at the moral intuitions involved (and remember that I have a fairly high view of moral intuition), but I think if we follow that combination of positions back to first principles we're left with some pretty sinister implications. If the pregnant woman has a right to bodily autonomy that supersedes the fetus's right to life but not the fetus's right to health, then the implication is that health is a more fundamental right than life and thus that it's more undesirable to be unhealthy than it is to be dead.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Drinking while pregnant should be a crime.

Attempting to enforce this would make enforcing an abortion ban look like a piece of cake.

If a child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the police should be notified and do an investigation to see if they can find evidence that the woman was drinking while pregnant.  If so, she should be charged with knowingly ruining her child's life by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Drinking while pregnant should be a crime.

Attempting to enforce this would make enforcing an abortion ban look like a piece of cake.

If a child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the police should be notified and do an investigation to see if they can find evidence that the woman was drinking while pregnant.  If so, she should be charged with knowingly ruining her child's life by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome.

What should be the penalty for that crime then?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I know Atlas is an overwhelmingly male space that often treats gendered issues in a highly abstract or utopian/dystopian way, so just so everybody is aware, I've run the concept of legally penalizing women for drinking while pregnant by three or four women I'm friends with and they've all agreed that it's an authoritarian NUT proposal that, as I said, makes banning abortion look hands-off and unintrusive by comparison. These are women who run the gamut in terms of their own beliefs about abortion, pregnancy, motherhood, etc., although I suppose they might be unrepresentative in that they're all friends with me.

[DC Al Fine]

Obviously I think the state should intervene in a variety of ways to promote fetal health, but I don't believe that the mere act of serving a visibly pregnant women a single drink comes remotely close to meriting intervention*. The bar should be allowed to not serve pregnant women if they want.

*I mean hypothetically, if a bar was serving someone fifteen drinks a night to someone for the duration of their pregnancy, then yes I'd want to see criminal charges, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.