Why what? Why does an umbilical person's wellbeing outweigh an thinking adult's choice?
I wouldn't have used that wording, but yes.
As societies we should raise healthy, confident well-educated children. That means that as a society we take collective responsibility for welfare and define those responsiblities in law.
There is no "society", only lots of individuals.
We provide free health, free education, and we accept that sometimes society as a whole is empowered to override the wishes of a parent as an individual (in carefully judged and balanced consideration).
You're talking about overriding the wishes of a parent in favor of a child. I'm talking about not overriding the wishes of a human being in favor of a biological entity that has no rights.
We see America today with the worst-educated middle class children in the modern world (normally a good benchmark for a system overall), we see policing combined with politicking and business wealth, we see big businesses refusing to pay tax leaving their employees to receive welfare aid from the country, we see a country that refuses to provide broad healthcare to its citizens because of an apparent fear from taxpayers that someone else might get more than them out of the system. Historically the US has eschewed the modernised views of many other societies and in my view we see her in poor shape because of it.
A) You just headed off to left field for no apparent reason
B) If you're not satisfied with the current system, why are you advocating for it?
Depends on the birth, and how many are several. In this case the qualified MDs took a judgement on how the number of hours affected the young person's survival chances.
I'm assuming several is less than 4. I usually use "several" to mean 3, sometimes, if I'm being sloppy, I'll mean 2. Never 1, and never 4. None of those numbers constitute a long time to be in labor (even if you add "several" hours to it).
Danoff, it's quite easy to imagine a situation where a woman could be a single mother of say three kids already, and die while exercising her right to vaginal disaster. Are those kids then left to die, or to burden others? Just trying to work out some of the permutations to your utopia.
Let's be clear about the scenario here:
- Single mother has 3 kids and gets knocked up with a 4th and decides to have it
- Doctors recommend surgery, she refuses
- Her choice leaves her dead
- 3 kids have no guardian, and no nearest relative
- No one wants to adopt them
- No one wants to foster them
Your question is presumably, what do we do with those kids and isn't that worth violating the mother's rights.
Part 1, what do we do with them. This scenario is one that has to be considered
regardless of whether we violate the mother's rights and force her to have surgery that she doesn't want in order to potentially save her life (we wouldn't know for sure that she'd die without the surgery, and wouldn't know for sure that she'd live with it). The reason this scenario has to be considered is that she could just as easily die in a car accident or slipping in the shower and leave the kids orphans.
So what do we do with them? There needs to be a children's shelter, ideally run by private charity. The US is
amazing when it comes to private charitable donations. Can you imagine a shelter having trouble collecting funds for kids if there were no alternative? I can't. I started to type up a response that goes further and assumes that no one will take them in and no one will donate to create a shelter for them, but I deleted it because I don't like discussing hypothetical worlds that look nothing like ours where we presume human behavior that doesn't exist.
Edit:
Ok I'll throw you a bone. I would be ok with requiring sufficient life insurance for the parent to cover the kid (healthcare, education, etc.) until their 18th birthday.
Part 2, isn't it worth violating the mother's rights so that we don't have to rely on charity. No, that would make us immoral people who, in turn, have lost our own rights.