wall@decwrl.UUCP (02/22/84)
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.