Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronald Brak
In another thread it has been suggested that telling people what food is healthy is nanny stateism. Wouldn't telling people how many how many fetuses are viable be nanny stateism too? Or is nanny-stateism okay when used to protect children in which case education about healthy diets would be okay when its goal is to improve the health of children? It seems pretty confusing.
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Nanny statism to me is regulation on how we affect ourselves. Telling me how to live my life, and so on.
How we affect the lives of others isn't. Pregnancy is one of those nice gray areas between an internal process to a woman and an external process with regards to her unborn children. Given the level of advancement in medical technology in keeping these kids even remotely viable
ex utero, I think its safe to call what a woman does to deliberately have a negative effect on the outcome of a pregnancy
intended to be carried to term (bite me, pro-lifers) steps enough into the "processes affecting others" side of the line to not fall into nannystatism. At that point when a woman decides the child(ren) she's carrying is going to be carried to term, its a parenting issue, not a personal health one. By putting 4 plus kids in a situation where they're being starved and stunted during a critical phase of their development, she's as much as abusing them.
What is the functional difference between having six kids kept in extreme confinement and starved in the womb, or in closets or cages and starved when they're adolescents?
As an aside, there's an escape clause I have with this. Naturally occurring high outcome multiplets do happen, and in those cases, circumstances dictate a different approach. I would put them in the same category of hellishly binded as I put women who's children have other serious prebirth defects that are identified. Should be noted, given the widespread use of fertility treatments, these cases are a pretty severe minority. I'm more impressed by the choices made by a woman in the US who delivered back to back sets of triplets (sans fertility assistance) than I am a woman who has a doctor inject her with a half dozen embryos who decides to roll the dice with all their lives at once.