Originally posted by: Atreus21
Originally posted by: Cerpin Taxt
Why is everyone avoiding the fact that waivers to bodily rights must be explicit? Do you realize that this whole debate is rendered irrelevant because of that?
What are bodily rights?
I dunno, you tell me. Do you believe a fertilized egg is a person?. Do you believe there should be laws passed that say so?. There is a
ballot initiative in Colorado that would define a fertilized egg as a person, I was hoping that I'd been fooled by an Onion headline.
I don't know if people will consider the ramifications of making of such thing a law. Fertilized eggs often fail to implant, for one thing, and pregnancies often miscarry. Will women be prosecuted for manslaughter under Colorado's new law for having miscarriages? Will there be a corps of sanitary pad inspectors to determine whether heavy, late periods are early miscarriages or just random occurrences?
What about pregnant women who smoke? Will they be taken into protective custody to prevent harm to the fetus? How about those who don't take their prenatal vitamins regularly or get enough exercise?. Perhaps the state of Colorado should just declare women to be walking, talking uteruses and be done with it.
If a fertilized egg is a person, can you imagine the havoc that will be created? I mean, how do you count people for censuses and congressional districts and various statistics, since one can never know exactly how many "people" there are?
Do all women get to file for tax exemptions for "children," even if the "child" never implanted and got flushed down the toilet on a tampon? How many "children" can a woman file for in a year?
How will the state file legal documents (normally called birth certificates) to ascertain the citizenship of fertilized eggs? How will the state file death certificates? Will all women be required to send in their pads and tampons for testing, to ensure that no "people" were conceived and died? Will a woman who had a "person" show up on her tampon be investigated for murder?
If a fertilized egg has actual due process rights, then it's going to be awfully difficult for pregnant women to be arrested, tried or imprisoned. If you imprison the woman, you've imprisoned this other "person" without due process. So you'd need to have a proper trial for the egg, too. Furthermore, it would need a lawyer to be appointed, and its lawyer would probably want to make sure the egg's trial was severed from the trial of the woman whose womb is about to go to prison.
How about inheritance? If grandpa dies leaving money to his grandchildren, to be divided equally, does a fertilized egg inherit on equal terms with the grandchildren who have already been born? If so, how do you prove that the egg was fertilized before Grampa's death, not after?
Someone may believe that a person is created at fertilization, but it's patently ridiculous for the government to behave as though that's the case. And that's excluding the fact that the debate over when a potential person becomes an actual person is a religious or philosophical debate, and thus the government should butt out. This smells, sounds and looks like a ballot initiative designed solely to get right wing nutcases out to vote in a swing state.
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