Reply #3: Nobody has the right to cut your abdomen open [View All]

[Warpy]

...without your permission if you are conscious and able to give or withhold it. This is MAJOR SURGERY, folks, with a significant risk, a great deal of suffering, and a very long recovery time.

People turn down medical treatment all the time, from JWs who refuse lifesaving blood transfusions to true believer Christian Scientists who refuse everything to elderly folks who have had enough and stop their dialysis treatments. We have this right to refuse any one else's violent invasion of our person against our will.

This woman will never be mother of the year, true, and she's a wholly unsympathetic character as she has been portrayed in the press. However, this doesn't change the fact that she has sovreignty over her own body, despite the fact that a fetus may be parasiting off it.

Are we moving to a society that dictates we undergo major surgery to yield a kidney or lobe of our livers because somebody else needs the "spare" part? How about one in which a married woman is charged with involuntary manslaughter for having menses, since she involuntarily participated in the death of a fertilized ovum if she and her husband had sex?

The suggestion of charging this woman with any sort of wrongful death is scary, to say the least.