What are the child’s legal rights?

Well, this seems to me to be the simplest question to answer. By assumption, once a fertilized egg becomes implanted it becomes an embryonic human being and a human being whether embryonic or otherwise is still a human being. As such (s)he should be endowed with all the rights of any human being in our society. Superficially this seems to solve the abortion debate but like most of these issues things are not so simple.

What we have to remember is that other people are intimately involved in pregnancy (principally the embryonic mother). Thus we have a situation whereby we have competing rights which need to be sorted out. It is this competition that leads to an admittedly uncomfortable solution (for me) to the abortion conundrum. It also seems to me that the extremists on both sides of the abortion debate (i.e., extreme exponents of the pro-life and pro-choice positions) conveniently ignore that abortion is a competing rights issue and instead narrowly focus on the rights of only one of the parties involved (usually the child or the mother but sometimes the father as well).

What are the legal and moral rights of the parents?

What are the legal and moral responsibilities of the parents?

These two questions have to be considered in tandem. Basically I assume that the embryonic parents have the same rights and responsibilities as that of any other parents. However there are some unique situations facing embryonic parents that have to be dealt with. For example, the embryonic mother and embryo are physically linked together which is not the situation after birth.

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Tags: Abortion, contraception, politics, Science

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Abortion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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