Alison at Creekside takes a sarcastic tone at my proposal that unborn children should be citizens.
Who among us has not been embarrassed at the shoddy treatment afforded fetuses when they attempt to vote or make a purchase on the Home Shopping Channel?
Is a fetus allowed to join the Canadian Armed Forces - Be All That You Can Be!- or buy a nice condo in the West End? Experience the rare thrill of emptying a nine millimeter into the target of their choice?
Sadly, no.
This also resembles the kinds of comments made at Bread n Roses.
Here's a basic notion of civics.
Citizenship isn't a function of age. A newborn baby is a citizen of a country.
So apply all of the above to newborns.
Does her sarcasm make sense?
No.
People are outraged and disgusted at the treatment of unborn children. Sadly, this contempt of the unborn also spills onto newborns, especially if they are handicapped. More and more handicapped children are being denied treatment because it is thought their lives are not worth living. A mother killing her newborn will only get her five years in prison, on the assumption that if she kills her baby, it's because she has post-partum depression-- although that is not always the case. A pregnant mother can pump herself full of drugs and give birth to an addicted baby, with no legal consequences whatsoever.
Young lives are devalued, and this is a new civil rights movement to have them acknowledged and protected.
Instead they are condemned to float in an insulated bubble affording them minimal contact with reality -
As a matter of fact, in his waking hours, an unborn child gradually has more and more interaction with the outside. After sixteen weeks, an unborn child can hear. He learns the sound of his mother's voice. He responds to what is said. He jumps at sounds.
Fetal psychology is in its embryonic stages (pun intended!). We are only just beginning to understand the mind of the unborn child. It is not blank, as some anti-fetal-rights people seem to think. Even newborns weren't that well known thirty years ago. It was thought that they did not experience pain: they were operated on without anesthesia. We're only beginning to establish scientifically what pro-lifers have known since the advent of ultrasound: unborn children feel pain.
With more research, the prejudices against the unborn child will be dispelled.
