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From: wall@decwrl.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: id AA14998; Wed, 22 Feb 84 09:24:53 pst
Message-ID: <5745@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-Feb-84 12:25:05 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.5745
Posted: Wed Feb 22 12:25:05 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 23-Feb-84 01:44:12 EST
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Date: Wed, 22 Feb 84 09:24:53 pst
From: wall (David Wall)
Message-Id: <8402221724.AA14998@decwrl.ARPA>
To: net.women
Subject: Re: Abortion

There is a long-standing implicit acceptance of the notion that
a child's civil rights vary inversely with his or her dependence
on parents.  Freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right
to bear arms, and a multitude of other rights, are regularly
withheld from children by their parents, and nobody seriously
questions the reasonability of this.  Not all such rights are
withheld, and the reasonability of withholding them decreases
as the child becomes more able to exist independently.

I don't see anything fundamentally illogical about supposing that
this inverse relation extends even to before birth, in which case
the important question is whether the inverse curve is sufficiently
steep to allow any particular violation of rights.  Since a fetus
is absolutely dependent on the mother, it seems to me that an
absolute violation of rights is the mother's prerogative.