Friday, November 4th, 2005...6:58 pm
Thoughts on abortion
The problem, as I see it, is that while the woman's body is hers, both parents have reasonable ownership claims to the embryo. After all, if the father doesn't have an ownership claim in the embryo, why should he be obligated to help pay for the baby's care after it is born?
Suppose we both jointly owned a mare that was kept on my farm. Suppose the mare accidentally gets pregnant and has a foal. Do I have the right to have the foal slaughtered without giving you a “reasonable accommodation” to retrieve it? My intuition would side with notifying you and giving you a chance to retrieve it.
On the other hand, what constitutes a “reasonable accomodation”? How long must I feed, medicate, and care for the animal? Surely I'm not obligated for the rest of the animal's natural life. At some point, I think the law should recognize that one of the partners has abandoned their ownership claim.
And what if the animal requires an expensive surgery to be kept alive long enough for you to retrieve it? Am I obligated to pay it?
As I see it, it seems reasonable that I be obligated to care for the animal, provided that a) I make a good-faith effort to notify you b) you agree to pay me for the animal's care until you can retrieve it. For example, suppose you were travelling in Europe and wouldn't be back for a year. You want to keep the foal, and you wire me the money to pay for the animal's care and surgery. In this case, I think I'm obligated to keep it until you return. (And I shouldn't mind too much, as I'm being compensated for my troubles.)
With respect to abortion, there are two questions. 1) Should the women be obligated to notify the father? 2) Should the father have veto power over the abortion?
Personally, I think that the father should be notified. That would at least give him a chance to negotiate for the life the embryo. I think that falls within the realm of “reasonable accommodation”.
Should the father be allowed to block the abortion? To my mind, the question is whether the risks, damage, and discomfort caused by nine months of pregnancy is a “reasonable accommodation” to allow the man to retrieve the “embryo/fetus/baby”.
As with the foal example, I would be willing to allow the father to block the abortion, provided that he recompensed the mother for the cost of the pregnancy (1). Given that the cost may well exceed $50,000, I suspect that most men would choose to allow the abortion to go forward.
Conversely, what if the mother had the embryo aborted without telling the father? What damages does she owe the father? This is a bit tricky, since the value of the embryo changes as it develops. At the time of birth, human babies are highly valued. However, their constituents at the time of conception (eggs and sperm) are not particularly valued. Also the father's sperm is much less highly valued than the mother's egg. If the value of the fertilized embryo is the sum of its constituent parts, then the mother's contribution will be make up much more of the embryo's value. Early in the pregnancy, I would suggest that the father should be compensated about the same as the cost of the replacement value of his sperm (about $500.00).
(1) http://www.everythingsurrogacy.com/cgi-bin/main.cgi?Section2B
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.