Reply #34: more apples and oranges

[iverglas]

The death rate of very young pregnant girls and over 35 pregnant women was pretty close (in fact the older number may have even been HIGHER).

This is sounding an awful lot like the argument that pregnancy isn't really riskier than abortion, so abortion is not necessary. Even if that were true, it would be irrelevant.

And the risk of pregnancy in older women is irrelevant to the question of whether the pregnancy of an 11-yr-old child should be terminated by someone else's decision.

Women are adults, and are competent to assess risks and to understand the potential consequences of their decisions, and thus to make the decisions for themselves. If a 40-yr-old woman with hypertension wants to continue her pregnancy to term, that is a decision that she is competent to make, because she is able to assess those risk of bad outcomes occurring for herself, and to understand the nature of the potential bad consequences of the decision. Unless an adult individual is demonstrably incompetent, we let him/her make his/her own choices about such personal matters.

It is adults' RIGHT to make such decisions, regardless of how horrible the potential outcomes and how high the risk of those outcomes materializing.

If an 11-yr-old's risk factors put her at the same risk as the 40-yr-old woman, she is NOT competent to assess the risks, or to understand the consequences of assuming them.

Like the adult woman, she has the right to life and liberty. But those rights commonly must be exercised on her behalf by other people, who are required to do so, in her best interests, and who do so all the damned time, because she is NOT competent to do so in her own best interests. That is simply a fact.

You're simply, repeatedly, refusing to address this issue.

There is nothing at all that distinguishes a decision as to whether a child's pregnancy should continue or be terminated from any other decision that will have an enormous impact on a child's life.

A child might have a better life, both now and for the rest of it, if she is allowed to drop out of school at 11 and spend all day surfing the net. But the odds of that *not* happening, and the risk of her life being shit if she does that vs. staying in school, are too high for her wishes to be the determining factor.

What is it about a pregnancy that makes that decision different??

EVERYTHING you are saying can be used by those who are against abortion to justify forcing a young girl to remain pregnant against her will.

Only if we accept what you persist in claiming: that the third party's delicate "moral" sensibilities override considerations based in reality.

I really don't give a crap what % of a population claims to believe that z/e/fs are human beings, any more than I would care what % of that population claimed to believe that there are faeries at the bottom of their gardens.

When it came to what was in the best interests of their children, I wouldn't be taking into consideration the fact that the pools of stagnant water they kept in the garden had to stay there in order to nourish the faeries.

I'd be turning my mind to the fact that pools of stagnant water breed mosquitos, and that mosquitos carry West Nile disease, and that their children were at risk -- regardless of how low the actual risk of getting West Nile disease actually is, because the outcome if they do get it is potentially horrible.

And I'd be advocating that they be required to at least demonstrate that there were other factors in play that meant that their children were not at the risk they would otherwise be foreseen to be at.


I understand that you're young, and you are concerned about children's rights. What you seem not to be considering is that children have a right to be protected from harm and given the best opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination in future, rather than just allowed to act on their child's notion of what is good for them when doing that would so very probably interfere in their future ability to exercise that right fully.