Rights of the fetus?

Once again this issue arises from the murk to confront us. I was thinking about a case which happened a while ago, where a woman pestered the surgeons into doing her C-Section at 35 weeks so that she could go to her sister's wedding. I couldn't believe they would do it, and even in retrospect I am still amazed that she could find a surgeon to do this.

To me, it seems unethical in the extreme to risk another person's life for a small social convenience. She could still have gone to wedding pregnant, after all. It was purely her own vanity and convenience that wanted the baby out of her and in the nursery for someone else to care for!

Of course, the baby suffered with respiratory distress and needed to be transferred to another hospital and ended up on a ventilator for a few days to stabilize his breathing. Oh yes, during this time she went to the wedding.

I asked the O&G guys how they could live with themselves (not quite in so many words of course) and was even more amazed and horrified at their answer. Since the baby is fetus, it has no rights. So if a mother requests a C-section early it is not a matter of weighing up the risk to the baby against her convenience. There is no consideration given to the baby's needs, if the mother does not advocate for it. The baby has no rights as an independent person at all!

I probably should not be surprised, since we practically have abortion on demand in this country. Women are still required to show that having the baby would "damage" them in some way, but since the range of damage accepted includes economic and social, this is not very difficult. After all, no-one can argue that having a baby is financially advantageous!

Technically, the baby is not a "person" until the moment the cord is cut. At that moment is becomes legally its own separate person with all the rights and protections from the state that any person can expect.

And yet, a fetus does have some legal existence. One child I have been seeing is receiving compensation from damages sustained from a car accident while in utero. It was obviously enough of a legal entity to receive compensation, yet if the mother had decided to terminate it she probably would have been legally entitled to do so. So a baby's life depends completely on its parents acting as its advocates. If they do not, no one else will, or in fact can. What a strange society we live in!