Laws and Pregnant women drinking at a bar

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

Option 2 or 3. I lean closer to option 1 than to option 4 if I absolutely had to choose because I think it's possible for the state to be overconcerned with fetal health to the point of it becoming a eugenic attitude.

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

Option 2 or 3. I lean closer to option 1 than to option 4 if I absolutely had to choose because I think it's possible for the state to be overconcerned with fetal health to the point of it becoming a eugenic attitude.

If regulating public physical health and safety without regard for genetics risks becoming eugenics, what is eugenics? Is physical education eugenic? Is welfare spending eugenic? The argument against genetics has always been that it is unfairly discriminatory because it is based in genetic divergence — but I can't see a whiff of that here.

To be clear, I fully recognize that this position of mine is crankish. I'll go through the rationale for it in a bit if you're interested.

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

Option 2 or 3. I lean closer to option 1 than to option 4 if I absolutely had to choose because I think it's possible for the state to be overconcerned with fetal health to the point of it becoming a eugenic attitude.

If regulating public physical health and safety without regard for genetics risks becoming eugenics, what is eugenics? Is physical education eugenic? Is welfare spending eugenic? The argument against genetics has always been that it is unfairly discriminatory because it is based in genetic divergence — but I can't see a whiff of that here.

To be clear, I fully recognize that this position of mine is crankish. I'll go through the rationale for it in a bit if you're interested.

tl;dr it's far from clear to me why the state should have the power to regulate substance consumption that might be damaging to fetal health in a society in which it doesn't have the power to regulate whether or not the fetus is carried to term to begin with. I don't intend this as a gotcha, I'm saying it out of respect for the fact that terminating a pregnancy is a right that most people in the Western world think women should have. Why would a pregnant woman's bodily autonomy extend to actually ending the fetus's life but not to behaviors that will be deleterious to its health if it's brought to term? Attempting to regulate--not only socially police, but legally regulate--pregnant women's consumption of otherwise legal substances only makes sense to me in a society where pregnancy in general is a highly regulated affair. Even as an abortion opponent, I feel that such a society would be unjustly restrictive of women's ability to conduct their own lives.

"Eugenics" was the wrong word, and is probably a word I overuse for attitudes towards health and wellness that I dislike in general. What I mean is that I think it reveals something unpleasant about attitudes towards the sick that fetal health is seen as more deserving of legal protection than fetal life; the implication is that it's better to be dead than to have fetal alcohol syndrome or whatever. A society that heavily restricted abortion also restricting women's ability to drink during pregnancy would make a lot more sense, but I would still oppose it for the reason laid out in the final two sentences of the above paragraph.

Option 2 or 3. I lean closer to option 1 than to option 4 if I absolutely had to choose because I think it's possible for the state to be overconcerned with fetal health to the point of it becoming a eugenic attitude.

Why would you ever pick option 2?

Shouldn't it just flat out be 3 for you? #workersrights?

It should be, yes, you're right. Option 3 it is. Thank you for pointing that out.

[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.

[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.

[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.