The litigious foetus
There is a scene in the Bob Fosse film Cabaret in which the heroine (played by Lisa Minelli), learning that she is pregnant, celebrates by drinking glass after glass of champagne with her lover. "To us, and to the baby!", she cries, as yet another goes down the hatch.
To the health-conscious 1990s viewer, it's hard to watch this scene without a twinge: if she's going to have the baby, all that champagne is exactly what a six-week-old foetus doesn't need! You remind yourself it's only a film, and that it was set in a time before people knew.
As Adele Horin commented in the August 6 Sydney Morning Herald: "Given all we know about foetal health, the pregnant woman's lot is a far cry from the time she could relax with a beer and a fag at the end of the day".
But should all this information give the state, busybodies and other assorted do-gooders the right to interfere? A few weeks of controversy raged in the United States after two overzealous young bar tenders refused to serve an obviously pregnant woman a strawberry daiquiri.
More serious was the US case in which a 25-weeks-pregnant woman dying of leukaemia was subjected to a "heroic" court-ordered operation to save the foetus. Both the woman and her foetus died. The rights of her foetus — the slim chance that it might be saved — were set above an adult's right to precious extra weeks of life.
Now the NSW Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a suit brought by an 18-year-old girl with cerebral palsy against her mother. The daughter was awarded $2.85 million in compensation (to be paid by the Government Insurance Office) for her mother's negligence in a motor accident while pregnant, which was held to be the cause of disability.
The Right to Life immediately claimed a victory: "It's very good news for us", said RTL chair Margaret Tighe. "It recognises that life begins at conception, not birth. It shows we have been right all along in saying that an unborn child is a person too and has rights."
She commented that while a "child killed in an abortion doesn't have the right to sue", another sibling or the father might be able to take action "because the child has been killed".
In Sydney Morning Herald article, Adele Horin
argues that the case may not be as alarming for women as it might seem at first glance.
She relates the opinions of feminist legal expert Regina Graycar, who sees claims that children with disabilities will now be freer to sue their mothers for having smoked or drunk alcohol when pregnant as far-fetched. People sue only if there's a pot of gold to be won (the GIO's funds available for motor accident victims), something improbable in most cases of the smoking or drinking mother.
The case did not alter the fact that legally, a person has to be born alive to accrue legal rights. The case did not, therefore, involve a new legal precedent that could bolster the anti-abortion cause.
That's good, but we still have to deal with the women-as-incubator psychology of the Moral Majority. Their fixation with the contents of women's wombs is reactionary and oppressive.
There's another point. A person takes her/his chances on the environment inhabited for the nine months between conception and birth. Some foetuses get to listen to classical music; some are fed Pritikin; some don't have to absorb chemicals from nearby petrochemical plants.
Other foetuses live in industrial wastelands and have to survive on fizzy drinks and chips. Where does a foetus draw the line in blaming mummy?
By Tracy Sorensen