Finfinder wrote:Fair enough but circling back to the the topic the state shouldn't have the right to tell the parents /woman where they can give birth then, correct?
Where? Not really but even more importantly they couldn't even enforce it if they wanted to. Even when parents want to be in the hospital, sometimes it does not happen as such. Deliveries have occurred in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, at home, in the toilet and even reportedly while the parents sleep!.
Furthermore, the evidence that we do have suggests that although in the US the rate of complication is higher in out-of-hospital, the numbers for both in-hospital and out-of-hospital mortality for an otherwise uncomplicated pregnancy to a healthy young woman is so small, that even thinking about legislating on this problem is silly at best.
Let me put it this way. The evidence that I have come across suggests that the rate of complications is twice for out-of-hospital vs in-hospital delivery. To put it in perspective, the rate of cancer for smokers vs non-smoker is somewhere between 30x to 70x more depending on studies and sources, the actual number is really not as important.
Technically speaking, you could have a far better impact on the health of the child by prohibiting (and prosecuting those who fail to adhere) mothers who smoke during pregnancy, drink alcohol during pregnancy, do drugs while in pregnancy. The slippery slope could lead to prosecuting mothers that do not go to their prenatal office visits, or do not take prenatal vitamins, or don't eat a well-balanced diet. Prosecute mothers who are over 35years old?
What about mothers that have epilepsy? Anti-seizure medications are notorious for causing birth defect. What if they get an infection and require antibiotics, some antibiotics are also teratogens.
Whatever the case might be. Until the moment of birth, the mother's rights and freedom should supercede the fetuses and that is how it is now and how it should be until we can figure out a way to take an embryo the minute of fecundation and grow it completely out of the mother. At that point, assuming the procedure to recover the embryo is not significantly painful/dangerous/difficult/inconvenient, then we can start thinking of which rights (if any) the embryo should have. At that point you could potentially prosecute a mother for endangering the fetus by smoking (for instance, if through a simple procedure we can get and grow the fetus out, and we knew that fetus growing outside mother would do better than if the mother continues to smoke). That, of course, introduces new ethical dilemmas, we couldn't possibly grow all potential embryos, after all it is estimated that a large portion of pregnancies end up in spontaneous abortion (probably higher than 50%!) so imagine a scenario where twice the number of humans are born, and the majority of those are actually unwanted by their parents!