Punished with a baby
There’s been a lot of talk about The One’s comment that he didn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby” if they made a mistake. This has been interpreted as PROOF!! that he would demand that his daughter have an abortion! As PROOF!! that he would willingly destroy his own grandchildren! The fiend!
But I think this is twisting what he (inartfully) said. The context is that he said this:
But it should also include — it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.
He was talking about contraception, not abortion. Didn’t anyone look at the words on the page? As for “punished with a baby”, I agree that was an inartful way of putting it. But where do people think babies come from? It’s not like Santa decides the girl’s been naughty so he puts a baby under the tree instead of a Wii. The girl ends up with a baby after approximately nine months of pregnancy. Pregnancy involves varying degrees of discomfort and even danger, and the danger is worse the younger the girl is.
What I believe The One meant is that he didn’t want his daughter to be punished with a pregnancy and therefore that he wanted her to have knowledge of contraception, so even if she made a mistake and became sexually active too young, at least she wouldn’t get pregnant.
The argument about him wanting to destroy his own grandchildren, which he could easily afford (the fiend!), is even stupider. He’s not talking about actual grandchildren. His daughters are too young to produce grandchildren for him even if they wanted to. He’s talking about hypothetical grandchildren that might be conceived at some point in the future, and he doesn’t want them to be conceived when his daughters are too young. Well, duh. Practically every parent on the planet, no matter how wealthy, tries to discourage their daughters from conceiving the hypothetical grandchildren that could exist if they got pregnant too young or with the wrong person. They’re all fiends!
Of course, this has nothing to do with his vote on the Born Alive Infants bill. To me this vote is symptomatic of a general confusion of abortion advocates between a woman’s right not to be pregnant (protected by Roe v Wade), and a woman’s “right” not to have had a child (not protected by anything). Once the child is no longer in her body, she’s no longer pregnant and that’s the end of it. She has no right under Roe v Wade (or anything else) to kill it.
The argument is made that the doctor is already under an ethical obligation to save the baby if possible. It is also pointed out that most often in these cases the baby is too premature to survive anyway, so the decision not to try to save it is defensible. It is also pointed out that there are cases where a baby is miscarried — that is, it is naturally born far too soon even though the woman wanted the pregnancy to continue — and such cases would cause conflict and litigation if there were a law mandating care for “babies born alive”.
So there are arguments that could be mustered again such a law, including the argument that it is just a “feel-good” law that wouldn’t actually alter medical practice but would lead to more litigation. On the other hand, I, like a lot of people, would feel better if the decision not to try to save a baby (or any other patient) were made by a duly appointed hospital committee which records the basis of the decision, as opposed to the doctor and family making the decision even though their interests may be furthered by the patient’s death.
That’s how I felt about the Terri Schiavo matter, actually — that in a case like that, where the patient is in a persistent vegetative state and the family wants her dead, there should be a duly appointed hospital committee that examines the evidence, maybe orders tests, and then records the basis of its decision in writing.
There will still be those who object on a religious basis to the action, but for those of us who were merely horrified at the thought that Terri might have been aware of what was happened as she was starved and dehydrated to death, it would be reassuring. For one thing, we would feel that if we got in that condition through some horrible mischance, someone would be willing to consider our situation dispassionately. (Note: the autopsy showed that Terri really was so far gone that she would not have suffered, which is good. But that could have been determined by a neutral third party, while she was alive, saving everyone a lot of passion about the issue.)