Speaking of Angels who definitely were not dancing on the heads of any pin.

I understand that Mom has a definite right to kill her unborn baby. It's her body and no one can interfere with her autonomy over her self because that way laws the horrors of theocracy where women are reduced to breeders. But can Mom take drugs that will permanently damage the baby? After all, the greater - death - must subsume the lesser - mere retardation or deformation. Also the sacred principle of autonomy doesn't change between the cases. Any how here is an article entitled Court: Neglect Laws Don't Apply to Fetus. Here are a couple of passages:

Colorado judges can't use child neglect laws to protect fetuses, but they do have the power to issue contempt charges against pregnant women, an appeals court ruled.

The court Thursday upheld a ruling by Fremont County District Judge Julie Marshall that dismissed the county's neglect proceeding against a pregnant woman who was using methamphetamine.

The county filed a dependency and neglect petition seeking to intervene to protect the health of the fetus. The petition said the child resided with the mother and was dependent or neglected as a result of the mother's drug use.

How the court can issue an injunction to preclude something that isn't classified as "child neglect" wasn't initially clear to me. I take it that the drug use was illegal and the court does have power to enjoin illegal activities. I further take it that if Mom was taking a legal mutagenic agent, the unborn baby - this future American citizen - would be S.O.L.

The horrors of this scenario are obvious and should make the most hardened feminist desparate for some loophole to protect said future citizen. This horror may illuminate something fundamentally irrational in the way that this issue is addressed. In his book Rationality in Action, John Searles criticizes the "classical model" of rationality - according to which one's conduct is rational or irrational depending on whether that conduct satisfies current desires - with the example of a 20 year old smoking student of his. The student was willing to agree that smoking would shorten her life and that when she was older she would regret her present decision, but right now she wanted to smoke and was indifferent to that later self's desires. Under the "classical model" this behavior was perfectly rational because there was a "sound deliberative route" from her existing motivational set to the activity of continued smoking. [Id. at p. 130.]

Searles views this conclusion and the behavior as obviously irrational.

The irrationality derives from the fact that the same self that makes the decision now is the self that will die by the age of sixty. It is not enough to say that right now she had no desires about her future. The problem is that, rationally speaking, she ought to have had desires about her future, because her present behavior is such that she is both satisfying and destroying one and the same self.....The point is that on the Classical Model the undesirability of dying later doesn't count at all, because it is not represented as part of the motivational set."

Smoking may not be wrong. Maybe you should go ahead and smoke. But it is irrational to claim that your later self has no stake in your present decision.

In the situation addresed in the article, there are, in fact, two "selves." There's the Mom and the Baby. Leaving aside Mom's sacred constitutional right to kill Baby, if Baby isn't flushed, then Baby's future self will have quite a bit of interest in the conduct which foreseeably would leave him or her deformed or retarded. It is as irrational for the legal system to ignore that interest as it is for Searle's student to ignore the interests of her future self when that self is coughing up her lungs.