At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky writes:
Women of America, I hereby apologize for the members of my sex from whom we’ve been hearing so much recently. What in the world is going on with these men? For a bunch of people who purport to be advancing allegedly “moral” positions, they are in fact the amoralists of our democracy. Their positions on contraception and sex, their “jokes” about aspirin between the knees, and now this utterly depraved Virginia ultrasound legislation that is apparently about to become law—we have now moved well beyond the realm of politics and into the dark and unchecked id of the contemporary right. (emphasis mine)
This apology reminds me of the “Dear Woman” duo who apologized for all of the past wrongs suffered by women at the hands of men. Even as someone who “chooses liberty”, I don’t understand why liberals don’t understand the premise upon which conservatives are basing their opposition to abortion. Conservatives state it precisely and clearly: they regard the fetus as a life, and to abort a fetus is akin to murder. The life of the unborn fetus trumps the privacy rights of the pregnant woman. Some conservatives believe that, and their proscriptions follow from this premise. And this premise is a legitimate one, isn’t it? The fetus is something, and it is a life. It is human. Ergo, it is a human life to which laws protecting humanity are applicable. It seems stupid to even have to rehash these principles, but I don’t understand why pro-abortion advocates read nefariousness into the beliefs of conservative people.
I’m only one person who has become increasingly less liberal on the issue solely because I don’t have a good argument to escape the fact that a woman doing something with her body necessarily requires her to inflict pain and death on something that is a life.
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It seems stupid to even have to rehash these principles, but I don’t understand why pro-abortion advocates read nefariousness into the beliefs of conservative people.
I’m only one person who has become increasingly less liberal on the issue solely because I don’t have a good argument to escape the fact that a woman doing something with her body necessarily requires her to inflict pain and death on something that is a life.
Admirable to see you thinking these things through, Chuck. I won’t say anything more.
I also find it interesting that this battle is becoming another example of the party of science, or however they phrase it, ignoring new technology. We know much more about how rapidly babies develop, yet we still pretend it’s just a ball of cells that transmogrifies into a baby during delivery
I’d see this as just one example in the larger habit liberals have of demonizing conservative positions.
For libs, is all this passion really about women’s rights, or is it about something less trivial like the SWPL’s instinct for eugenics?
It’s called projection. They read nefariousness into the beliefs of others about abortion because they really enjoy murdering children and don’t want people to realize their bloodthirsty, cowardly joy.
May ever woman who’s ever aborted when her life wasn’t threatened be gang raped and thrown in a pit of acid. Then get cancer, have all her loved ones abandon her, and die a painful, agonizing, lonely death.
I’m pro choice and pro abortion, but I mostly agree with what you say here. By pro abortion I mean as the method of last resort when the child isn’t wanted by both bio parents at that time.
Nonetheless I can definitely understand and respect conservatives’ arguments against abortion, particularly those of religious conservatives.
The later parts of this I disagree with. It is alive but not independently. I don’t think at early stages a live fetus is yet a human life. It is developing into one, and in the normal course usually will become one, but at early stages it looks more like a tadpole for example. I can respect conservative opinion on this to the contrary however, though I expect them to respect mine and others with views similar to mine as well.
The Supreme Court in Roe quite reasonably from a moral point of view I think decided that it was too late after the end of the second trimester in most circumstances, since the fetus has become too much human for it to be tolerable to end its life through abortion, but alright before then.
It was reasonable on moral grounds but not on legal precedent or reasoning as being required by the Constitution. That was about as pure legislating from the bench as the Warren court ever got. It was a tremendous stretch to assert that this grew out of a privacy “penumbra” found earlier by the court.
I’m basically for abortion on practical and expedient grounds, and because there’s a bright line between aborting a fetus and being allowed to kill a child or chose infanticide for an infant. (Though I will note that lots of high civilizations in the past have practiced infanticide, without total moral collapse.)
I used to be pro choice in my head and pro life in my heart, meaning if a woman wants to kill a kid rather than carry it for 9 months and give it the opportunity to live with another family, so be it but i’d never do it. i’m solidly pro-life now. once you’ve seen a kid bouncing around at 19 weeks on a plasma tv output or felt the flutter of kicks on the stomach’s surface when they hear music, you realize how foolish it is to think it’s ok for an individual to decide when life starts. We’ve made it too easy for young women to make bad decisions. If you had asked women 45 years ago if with the pill there’d be 1.4 mil abortions every year and 40% of kids would be born out of wedlock, they have said it would never happen.
i do think freakonomics was onto something with crime so I do see a silver lining to roe v. wade.
The group with by far the highest per capita rate of abortions is blacks.
If there is a question as to when life begins, it behooves us to err on the side of caution. I find Doug1′s statement about being “alive, but not independently” rings hollow – children aren’t able to live independently for several years *after* birth… should they be considered disposable too?
“The group with by far the highest per capita rate of abortions is blacks.”
And females are aborted far more commonly than males. Where’s the feminist outcry over that?
You ask a very good question; one that has also puzzled me.
I believe that the ability to discern the first principles of a foreign mindset is unusual. Most people assume that others hold the same understanding of “the Good” as they do, and cannot recognize that arguments based upon this “good” will have no effect on an opponent who believes that their notion of “the good” is faulty. When their arguments fail, they assume that their opponent is either stupid or has a malicious ulterior motive for their position.
For left-liberals, personal autonomy is the highest good. The only “evil” that can justify a restriction on personal autonomy is a violation of someone else’s personal autonomy. Since a fetus is radically dependent on its mother and is not personally autonomous, it does not register as a “person” needing protection. Any restriction on a woman’s right to abort it is an outrageous imposition on her sovereignty over her own body.
For the conservative, the mother and fetus alike are radically dependent on God–the mother is not “god” over her fetus, which has inherent personhood simply by virtue of being a human life made in the image of God. Abortion is therefore murder. Arguments about choice [to murder?] are irrelevant and repulsive.
It should be pretty clear that these sides can never come to moral agreement–one or the other would have to convert to the opposing frame of reference.
The truth is that conservatives – with rare exceptions, don’t really believe that abortion is murder. Seriously: if you knew there was a place in your town where parents were taking children they didn’t want and killing them, wouldn’t you do something about it? I would. Sure, they’d jail me for the rest of my life … small price to pay for the safety of all those children though, right?.
But with rare, rare exceptions, social conservatives don’t do this. The guys blowing up clinics? They’re merely taking the argument about abortion and applying it consistently to the facts on the ground. Look … either all conservatives who believe abortion is murder should be taking the necessary steps to stop it … or they’re all cowards … or they don’t really believe their own rhetoric.
The “right” to abortion is really about the “right” to self-annihilate.
When your base assumptions are “continuous human progression” in a “strictly material world” through the application of your highest values – nondiscrimination and tolerance – then this is where one reaches endpoint liberalism, i.e., Final Liberation. Ergo, the “right” to self-annihilate.
Rejecting abortion is very simply rejecting the idea that YOUR MOTHER had a “fundamental right” to KILL YOU in utero and if she would have done so, it would have been a “good thing” as she was exercising her “fundamental right.”
When a female aborts her child, she is LITERALLY killing a part of herself. She is expressing her “right” to self-annihilate.
This is the real end game.
there is no conversation between mutually incomprehensible 1st premises “life” vs “choice”. they are not talking about the same things on the same planet. i have always taken a justified homicide approach to abortion rather than the stupid dumb “pro choice” malarkey–it’s killing, but not all killing is murder. i favor self defense, the death penalty, war and giving cops lots of leeway on killing perps, and i favor legal abortion too–hell i can even entertain an argument for actual infanticide, the romans did it, why can’t we. give me a man and a woman and 9 months and i’ll make you another baby. but stop looking me in the face and telling me that new set of chromosomes developing in a little tadpole isn’t a “human life” because that’s just fuckin’ silly. also, if women can kill the baby, why on earth can’t men at least disown it in utero? inconsistent mess
In all my years of commenting, I’ve NEVER come across a liberal who would assert his mother’s “fundamental right” to kill him in utero.
Which is to say that no self-identifying liberal REALLY BELIEVES in abortion UNLESS he is a bona fide self-annihilator. And no liberal will admit to the logical consequence of their belief system and actually admit to such a dirty personal secret.
The consistent application of nondiscrimination and tolerance is the SUREST PATH to self-annihilation.
I’ve NEVER come across a liberal who would assert his mother’s “fundamental right” to kill him in utero.
I would and I’m not even liberal. But then I don’t think you can be wronged by never having existed, and I don’t view existence to have begun before consciousness. To me it’s no more absurd to assert my mother’s right to have aborted me than to assert her right to have conceived a baby on a different day, thus “denying” me life.
The truth is that conservatives – with rare exceptions, don’t really believe that abortion is murder.
Because the truth is they don’t really think an embryo is fully human. No one does. Something like 80% of embryos are flushed out after conception, half of which would have been fully viable. (See here, for some reason I can’t get the original article to load.) And yet no one thinks this is some grand national catastrophe worthy of throwing the best scientific minds at. Nobody thinks “for every baby I actually have, I’ve created two that died.” Seriously, if I thought literally millions of “babies” were dying every year even if induced abortion were outlawed, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed from the despair.
@Pete: “if you knew there was a place in your town where parents were taking children they didn’t want and killing them, wouldn’t you do something about it? I would.”
No, you wouldn’t. Westerners will not get their hands dirty to avenge some stranger (and usually not even a loved one), as we have been instructed to let the system handle it. E.g., every white person knows O.J. murdered two white people, was livid that he got away with it, and knew from press reports where he lived and played golf — where he presumably cracked jokes about “his slice” or how his golf partner was “killing him today”. Yet, nobody took action. Sure, years later the State of Nevada found justification to lock his ass up, but that sentence was lenient compared to the death penalty he deserves.
Any male who masturbates is essentialy killing a “potential” life just as that cluster of cells is a “potential” life. The argument will always boil down to a religious based argument, When does life began? I don’t have a good answer for that but I’m certainly open to restrictions on abortion but I am not open to making abortion illegal. As was written above blacks are the highest recipients of abortions and I would like to keep it that way. Too many unwanted children end up being produced from these monster making factories.
Simple, don’t like abortions don’t have one. Want to save children, offer to pay for a pregnant womans up keep, medical, and adopt the child when it is born if you are not willing to do this then shut the hell up. I am not willing to do this so let her scrape it out.
There is an easy rule here: life begins at conception. At that point, unless something interferes (natural or artificial), a baby will be born. Un-natural interference is tantamount to murder, in my view, because it short-circuits a process that may have otherwise resulted in a live human birth.
People wring their hands about “when does life begin”, when the easiest answer is that the beginning is when it will be born unless something happens to make it not be born (again, natural or artificial). And the fact that something can naturally happen no more justifies artificially short-circuiting something that may not have naturally happened any more than murdering someone who is suffering from a terminal disease without their consent (the baby can’t consent … no I don’t use the word “fetus”, because I have never heard a woman who *wanted* the baby refer to it as “my fetus”, and this is just a totally ridiculous, dehumanizing term intended to make it easier for women to murder their own unborn babies).
Oh yes, some will bring up problematic cases which call for exceptions — which are not impressive. Perhaps there should be some exceptions under certain extreme circumstances (rape, incest, etc.), but those no more call into question the general principle than do other numerous principled exceptions do in other contexts.
“Look … either all conservatives who believe abortion is murder should be taking the necessary steps to stop it … or they’re all cowards … or they don’t really believe their own rhetoric.”
Or they have richer lives than solitaires like yourself. Moral calculus: if I take out the local PP, what happens to MY children?
@MuayTyson:
you scum-sucking lefty faggot, you deliberately lie and pretend we’re arguing about “potential” life.
We’re not.
it’s about actual existence, not potential. But, of course, being a lefty faggot, you don’t want to have that debate—-because you know you’ll lose.
I hope someone “aborts” you, faggot. After all, you’re just a collection of cells, not “really” alive at all.
Chris,
… then assert it and put it down in the blogosphere.
Further, it doesn’t matter what “conservatives” think abortion really is or isn’t. “Conservatives” aren’t preaching and teaching self-annihilation through the consistent application of nondiscrimination and tolerance. A person who is indiscriminate about their existence and tolerant of their hypothetical demise just shouldn’t get a voice in the matter.
Imagine…
Chris: Hey mom, do you think you had a “right” to abort me?
Mom: Of course, Chris… It’s a “fundamental right” that I have. I’ve never rejected or rescinded that “right,” I just missed the opportunity to do a good thing. Sorry.
Chris: Oh… Ok, cool mom… Talk to you later.
The very epitome of nondiscrimination and tolerance. The radical autonomist laid bare.
Chris,
… then assert it and put it down in the blogosphere.
I don’t blog (anymore). But you seem to think that hypothetical conversation with my mom is something I’d be ashamed of. It isn’t. Again, I don’t view it as any different than if my parents had had sex one minute earlier or later. In either situation, I simply never would have been. So be it, and it’s ludicrous to assert that some “right” of mine would have been violated.
A person who is indiscriminate about their existence and tolerant of their hypothetical demise just shouldn’t get a voice in the matter.
It’s called accepting reality, and people who are grown up enough to do it are the only ones who should get a say in any matter. Look, conservatives are supposed to be able to face up to the facts, so here they are. There are no souls. You could have easily not existed, and it wouldn’t matter. You will die, and that will be the end of your existence. What you call “you” is a manifestation of the physical processes of the brain, and the notion that there is a coherent, unified “self” is a fantasy. You certainly don’t have free will.
The tooth fairy isn’t real either.
And none of this nonsense is necessary to be a conservative.
@ David F.
It’s far worse than you describe. Liberals have gone beyond personal autonomy to advocate what I call “personal sovereignty”, meaning the right to do whatever you want to do, period. Thus they make excuses for the likes of abortion, black on white crime, terrorism committed in the name of Islam, gays buggering 500 partners of their own sex each year, etc.
In a world where everyone is sovereign, the only limit on one’s behavior is that imposed by violence where sovereignties come into conflict. We’re getting real close to that now.
There’s a dual problem.
Conservatives: The life is not independent; in effect, this is a sub-unit of the mother’s life, until it’s born.
Liberals: Even though the baby is a sub-unit of he mother’s life, it’s also a distinct being, whose brain is active at a very, very early stage, and which feels pain very early.
Biology isn’t filled with hard borders. It’s grey. Our laws require hard borders, and hence, either it’s a human at conception or it’s a human only at birth.
The truth is that it’s both. And this, both conservatives and liberals can’t seem to grasp.
A lot of women have a problem with abortion, even as they demand the free choice; many demand the free choice for ideological reasons, and many want it done away with for ideology.
But women often have contempt for other women who get abortions, but say nothing. The most hard-core feminists have admitted to me that they think women who get abortions are killing babies, but that they don’t know what to say about it, because they don’t want to deny a woman’s choice.
Of course, there’s the rub: As with nature-nurture, where both sides are again completely wrong and proceeding from false premises, there’s no dichotomy involved but what we impose on it.
It’s both murder of an independent being and the ending of a woman’s organic processes. Life is not obliged to fit our neat categories.
In other words:
Expect it to be trouble.
Conservatives should see that feminists spy treachery in conservative motivations. And feminists should see that there are genuine concerns for moral rights to being allowed to live among conservatives.
Of course, then you get to capital punishment and other such things and the contradicitons start to come out, with the caveats and the exceptions and the complex meanderings.
But the root of it is this:
Biology is not obliged to suit our neat rules, and I suspect there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance among feminists and conservatives alike.
It’s easy to ignore someone else’s argument when you’ve convinced yourself that they are evil religious authoritarians.
whorefinder 02/19/2012 at 12:35 am
@MuayTyson:
you scum-sucking lefty faggot, you deliberately lie and pretend we’re arguing about “potential” life.
We’re not.
it’s about actual existence, not potential. But, of course, being a lefty faggot, you don’t want to have that debate—-because you know you’ll lose.
I hope someone “aborts” you, faggot. After all, you’re just a collection of cells, not “really” alive at all.
LOL, Great argument. Calling names is the last resort of the ignorant.
Now I see the true measure of your intellect. I think we are done. You lose, in no way are you my equal. I refuse to debate with such a dimwit.
For fucks sake Whorefinder look how moronic you are. Want to find a whore go to your family reunion champ.
“They read nefariousness into the beliefs of others about abortion because they really enjoy murdering children and don’t want people to realize their bloodthirsty, cowardly joy.”
Though that’s hyperbole, the leftists sound more like being the religious nuts that they so much hate, consider Ms Joanna Rytel from the feminist freedom nation of Sweden.
http://www.vice.com/read/fetus-cakes-and-feminist-porn
And how the evil white male gets his comeuppance for Islamophobia/xenophobia, and yet:
http://ozconservative.blogspot.in/2004/10/is-this-freedom-is-this-equality.html
Unfortunately her better performances were not deemed viewable by the family-friendly youtube
and this quip about her videos from the interview above:
“”What have viewers projected onto them?
Many believe that the animals in the films are symbolizing men, so I explain that, “No no, I don’t compare animals with men. Animals are wonderful, men are little beasts.””
Kinda obvious that only the vilest misogynists will find fault with this upstanding and outspoken young lady.
Chris,
The only ones that are denying reality are self-annihilators such as yourself and those conservatives who just can’t bring themselves to think that there are so many self-annihilators amongst them.
You see… You weren’t aborted BUT your mother could have “legally” done so AND she would have done a “good thing” in aborting you as she would have been exercising her “fundamental right.”
And because you exist, you are obliged to answer these very questions as it is clear that those who have been aborted cannot.
Did your mother have a “fundamental right” to kill YOU in utero?
Does your wife have a “fundamental right” to kill YOUR son and/or daughter in utero?
Does your sister/sister-in-law have a “fundamental right” to kill your niece and/or nephew in utero?
Does your daughter have a “fundamental right” to kill your grandchild in utero?
These are very straightforward yes/no questions that require no appeals to religion, no appeals to science, no debates about consciousness, no arguments over conception and no disputes about one’s human status.
These questions and your answers simply tell us whether you are a self-annihilator or not?
Clearly, you are.
And that should have serious repercussions as it concerns your voice in the public domain.
“Something like 80% of embryos are flushed out after conception, half of which would have been fully viable. (See here, for some reason I can’t get the original article to load.) And yet no one thinks this is some grand national catastrophe worthy of throwing the best scientific minds at. ”
Not even for 40 year old with her ultra fertility treatment?
And when you can import people from where 10 year olds are having babies, and you are not a racist who thinks that only his race should reproduce over his land, or/and a sexist who thinks that women are baby-making factories for Deutschland uber alles, such contingencies don’t sound important.
“Any male who masturbates is essentialy killing a “potential” life just as that cluster of cells is a “potential” life. ”
So any menstruating female is killing a potential life? And the eggs that are perishing without a womb sojourn?
It’s no more killing a “potential” life than a man is having a “potential” romance with a hb10 he jerks off to at a porn site.
“children aren’t able to live independently for several years *after* birth… should they be considered disposable too?”
How many adults will survive if wal-mart etc run out of their daily provisions?
How many of women were able to live independently? How many pregnant women?
The issue is that of knowledge(should a doctor not care about a disease in the fetus, or an engineer about the durability of a structure) and ethics, morality vs practicality/legality and the tyranny of the already living, who are capable of ‘independent’ existence and their desire to make the most of it, since the fiction of after-life is done for.
If all you high mineded so called conservatives are so concerned about life why don’t you start by emtying all the orphanages in this country, This is life thats allready on the ground. But no it’s easy for you to throw bombs at some poor womens uterus in the name of protecting life.
rooster:
there’s a difference between taking life away and not providing the best possible home for a child.
Metal rooster, how many pro-lifers do you actually know in person?
And do you have any original thoughts on the subject, or is recycling talking points easier and less taxing on your brain?
“If all you high mineded so called conservatives are so concerned about life why don’t you start by emtying all the orphanages in this country, This is life thats allready on the ground. But no it’s easy for you to throw bombs at some poor womens uterus in the name of protecting life.”
A) Orphanages don’t exist for the most part anymore.
B) It’s the conservatives, particularly church-going conservatives, that adopt most of the children in this country (and elsewhere, really). We would adopt far more if we could, but as most unwanted children are simply aborted these days, the bar for adoption has been raised unreasonably high in terms of finances and bureaucracy.
C) One does not have to provide shelter to all of the homeless people in the world to oppose homelessness.
” Orphanages don’t exist for the most part anymore.”
Let me clarify before someone pedants all over the place… the orphanages “in this country” do not exist – they’ve been replaced by the foster system.
Let us sum up metal rooster’s incredibly weak retort.
Hey MAN, you better give those females their radical sexual autonomy or be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Metal rooster, we are already suffering the consequences of abortion and the radical sexual autonomy of the female.
It’s called a self-annihilating society.
Surprised to see you pulling out this argument, I generally get it from religious types. The obvious rebuttal would be, when does life begin? Is jerking off mass murder? … etc.
Late-term abortion is already illegal.
PRO-LIFE you people crack me up your for the death penalty your for drone bombing women and children all over the planet. Your whole pro life thing is so you can prop yourself up and think that somehow you are more moral than everyone else. None of you have any right to judge anyone put in a situation were they decide if an abortion is right for there family.
I see you still haven’t graduated beyond throwing around tired, easily refuted.
Get to know some actual pro-lifers.
You will find that (1) they do help children after they are born, both by adoption/foster parenting and by volunteering for charities, and (2) they don’t all have the same opinions on war or the death penalty.
If you’re not going to be honest and challenge your inaccurate prejudices, then please don’t come posting here again.
correction: that should read “easily refuted cliches.”
Why Don’t Liberals Accept Conservative Premises on Abortion? Because neither do conservatives. No one holds a funeral for a miscarriage, nor do the police file a death report and consider launching a homicide investigation for infanticide. For first time pregnancies, 75% of fertilized eggs result in a miscarriage. Does anybody consider this a high rate of infant mortality? Of course not. In fact, many of these fertilized egg deaths occur in the first 2 weeks of pregnancy and go unnoticed. So following the logical conclusions from the premise that a fetus life is the same as a born human results in some silly conclusions. Try this thought experiment. A hospital is burning down and you have choice of saving a 5 year old girl or a tray of 100 human embyros. Which would you save?
@ Anna ok what is a so called pro lifer maybe you can clime down off your high horse and explain.
Correction climb
Based on a quick Google search, people do hold funerals for miscarried babies .
Regardless, it’s a weightless argument. Conservatives are not trying to criminalize nature. Natural abortion and miscarriage are not choices. The orthodox hold different views on contraception and masturbation, but that’s a stupid argument as well. To go for the bumper sticker answer, abortion stops a beating heart. Comparing the lack of tears over the loss of a potential heartbeat to the actual battle over real heartbeats is an asinine diversion.
Why correct climb and not the plethora of other errors? For example, when calling conservatives idiots or hypocrites, you want to say “you’re” as in “you are.” Your is possessive.
I’ll explain once you answer my question first:
How many pro-lifers do you know in person?
@Ulysses Ok, an extreme minority hold funerals for miscarriages. These are the same type of people that believe the earth is 6,000 years old. The broad masses, conservatives and liberals alike, do not hold funerals for miscarried 1 week old fetuses because they don’t consider it a human mortality event. To view abortion as murder while not believing a fetus deserves every right and respect in the event of a death (a funeral) is cognitive dissonance. To fall back on “bumper sticker” answers and “natural versus manmade” deaths is the real asinie diversion. Do we discount the death of a loved if they died a man-made cause versus a natural one? Lack of tears? “Oh gramps died of a heart attack so its no big deal. Had he died in a car accident…” A death is a death is a death. If you think abortion is murder, then miscarriages must be considered human mortality.
The question people should be asking is not whether a woman has the right to end a pregnancy but rather, does that women (and men too) have the right to get pregnant in the first place? Why are we so ready to accept the notion that anyone with genitals has the right to bring a human being into this world, without having any obligation to prove he or she is capable of caring for this child? If we really care about human life, should we not question the right to create human life?
Fine. For consistency sake, I’ll support a law outlawing massive strokes, heart attacks, car accidents, etc.
The point is that abortion is a conscious choice. None of the purported parallels revolve around a choice. How grief is expressed is not a factor.
@Ulysses,
Fair point but now let’s say a women miscarries because she made a conscious choice that caused the miscarried. For example, she went bunjie jumping or something. should she be investigated for manslaughter?
I am pro choice but for me its not a women’s empowerment issue .
I just don’t see something that can survive without normal care because of its development a person, its just tissue.
And if anyone asks about infanticide, our society can’t deal with that but it makes sense for severely deformed babies with very low quality of life.
I just don’t see something that can survive without normal care because of its development a person, its just tissue.
You’re a liberal. And you’re still a feminist. Is autonomy what makes a person HUMAN to you sicko? Is independence all that matters? Keep your freedom freak.
ATrain – The bungee question is a good one. I’m not a normal socon, I’m not even sure I would be asked to join because of some other positions I hold, so my approach would probably err toward not opening that can of worms because of the difficulty of proving causality. Even if we started with something cut and dried like charges for miscarriage due to a crack binge, the nanny staters would co-opt it and start charging moms for having that bag of Cheetos. (Same creep is why I would not vote to license parenting no matter how much I personally think many people have no business procreating.)
I was long pro-choice, but find my position changing into more of a liberty of the least of us line of thinking.