A Question of Rights

I am currently 26 weeks pregnant with my second child, a little boy, whom my husband and I plan to usher into the world at home, rather than in a hospital. The decision to homebirth is, to say the least, a controversial one in the medical community. There are certainly those doctors who would argue that I am endangering my fetus by choosing to birth with a midwife in attendance, outside of the hospital setting. But as a competent adult and citizen of the United States, that should be a decision that I have the right to make and carry out. It is my body, after all.

Unfortunately, the ability of pregnant women to make such medical and bodily decisions for themselves is coming under attack, and in the most insidious ways.

On April 4, the North Dakota State Senate voted to defeat legislation that would have defined as a human being "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens," whether inside or outside the womb; in addition, the legislation would have conferred equal protection under the law to these organisms, from the moment of fertilization.

The scary part is that the North Dakota House had already passed this bill.

While on the surface, this may look like yet another battle in the abortion debate, the fact of the matter is that bills like this not only undermine the ability of a woman to make decisions about abortion, they undermine the rights of women to make medical decisions, period. By defining life as starting at conception and conferring equal rights on fertilized eggs, suddenly, every miscarriage can be considered a possible homicide, every woman who drinks alcohol or uses drugs when there is a possibility that she might be pregnant is guilty of child abuse, and every pregnant woman who does not agree with the advice of her doctor could be forced, against her will, to undergo medical intervention because of the "rights" of the unborn.

Think I'm overreacting? In 1986, Ayesha Madyun was court-ordered to have a c-section after her water broke two days earlier and she had not given birth; doctors argued there was a 50-75% chance that the fetus was in danger of infection if Ms. Madyun refused intervention. The baby was born healthy with no sign of infection. In 1987, Angela Carder, a woman who was extremely sick with cancer, was forced by a hospital and a judge's order to undergo a cesarean section to deliver her daughter at 26 weeks of gestation. The neonate lived two hours; Mrs. Carder died two days later, and the c-section was listed as one of the causes of her death. In 1996, Laura Pemberton, a woman who was denied the VBAC she wanted, was arrested by a sheriff while in labor and forcible brought to a hospital to have a c-section; Ms. Pemberton later went on to have 4 more children vaginally, without incident, though she labored in hiding. In 2003, Amber Marlowe, a woman in Pennsylvannia, was told by doctors that she had to have a c-section because the fetus was estimated to be 13lbs, which, in their opinion, was too large to birth vaginally. While the doctors and hospital were successfully getting a court order to force the c-section, Mrs. Marlowe and her husband went to a different hospital, where she successfully delivered the 11lb, 9oz girl vaginally without medication.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

No court can compel a person to have medical intervention, such as a transplant or blood donation, for the benefit of another already living person. Yet, these cases show that when it comes to pregnant women, their rights to make medical decisions for themselves are not absolute. If attempts to define personhood at conception succeed, how many women will be forced to undergo interventions and treatments that they do not want? How many women will avoid getting adequate prenatal and personal medical care in order to avoid the chance of being forced into unwanted treatment? Where will it end?