Smasharoo wrote:
Husbands have no rights in regards to unborn children in this or any other circumstance. Nor should they. If children were gestated in robots, neither parent should have the right to abort the process, the reason women have this right is because it is unavoidably a woman's health issue and the importance of control over their own bodies sometimes is more important than the right of an unborn child to be born.
I disagree.
A woman always has the right to control her body. Whether or not it's 3 weeks into a pregnancy or 8 months is largely irrelevant. If we're going to treat women as persons, they need to be given the agency to actually act as persons. Requiring women to remain pregnant, in any circumstance, fundamentally erases personhood by treating them as broodmothers. It's essentially a slavery situation on a micro scale - we accept a scenario in which women have rights, but we make those rights conditional to the service of another.
Plus, I don't agree with you re: abortion in tank scenarios. If a fetus is 4 months along and the parents decide they don't want to be parents, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to abort that pregnancy. It's not a person. It doesn't have rights to be born because it has the theoretically capability to actually be born.
Maybe there is a point where a fetus attains personhood, and it attains the right to life. And, sure, if that's the case then the parents couldn't abort it (since abortion wouldn't be an act of agency on part of the woman to control her own body).
But, personally, I don't think the actual state of personhood is developed until a fair bit after birth. I think we set birth as a convenient time for personhood to be considered, because actually marking the specific moment a baby becomes a person isn't realistic, and there are additional social reasons (like developing relationships) that make personhood-at-birth desirable as a policy.
Either way, in this situation, the question is relatively simple for me. If you believe that a person has the right to control the fate of their bodies after death (and trust that this woman's family isn't ************** then she should be taken off life support. If you don't believe that, then you already have your answer - the state/hospital can do what they want.
Or maybe you think that the person's wishes don't matter, but the family's do. Then you have the answer that she should be taken off.
It's not really a complicated situation with regards to what the right course of action is. Legally, it doesn't sound too complicated, either.
If they wrote the law such that an individual needs to be a patient for it to apply, it doesn't. If they didn't write the law that way, it probably does.
Whether or not you agree with that depends on where you fall on the flowchart. /shrug