Right to Life or Duty to Rear
As a matter of legal reasoning, please note that current law, including truancy laws and child welfare laws, will punish a parent who neglects, abuses, underfeeds, beats, or fails to educate his child.
These laws impose positive duties on parents to protect and rear the child, regardless of the citizenship of the child, nor is there any legal test of capacity or personhood for such things. It is not legal to kill a child who is insane, retarded, nor autistic due to mental incapacity. The childrearing duty applies to all children, regardless.
When does this duty obtain?
Note also that lawsuits for paternal support do not make payments of father to child dependent marriage or any other covenant or contract by the father agreeing to support and rear the child: the mere fact that the child exists, and is his, is sufficient, in the eyes of a law, to impose a duty to support the child, even for father absent from the home.
There is no requirement that the child be born in wedlock for the father to be bound, in law, by the duty to support and rear him.
Eating the corpse of a baby is likewise illegal, as is disposing of his corpse other than through burial, cremation, or some other method that treats the corpse reverently. Selling the corpse is illegal, in part or whole, at least at common law (which is why it is a scandal that Planning Parenthood was found harvesting and selling organs and biological material from dead babies).
These laws, needless to say, do not apply to livestock, which can be eaten or disposed of in any casual way provided it is sanitary.
Again, this means that the child is recognized at law as human without any test of citizenship, legitimacy, or capacity.
Actions both civil and criminal can be brought against anyone who negligently or willfully harms or kills a child, including, and this is well established in the law, civil suits against drug companies or against the employers of pregnant women if unsafe treatments or unsafe working conditions was found to cause birth defects, such as blindness or stunted limbs, even if the child was exposed to the chemical or drug before birth.
Logically, such an action could be brought against a parent who deliberately, or by negligent injection of a substance known to cause birth defects, to blind or maim a child in the womb — albeit I cannot recall any such cases to mind.
Given (1) that parents have a duty to protect and rear a child in a safe and diligent fashion, which includes the duty to providing food, shelter, and education, and given (2) that this duty is not dependent on any agreement or consent on the part of the parent, and given (3) that any act of negligence or malice leading to the child’s harm or death are actionable, including acts done to the child while in the womb, therefore (4) the conclusion is inevitable that the parental duty to protect the child must at least be in force when the child is still in the womb.
If so, how can the deliberate act by the mother to kill the child in the womb not contradict her duty to protect and rear the child, which otherwise obtains?
The argument that the child is trespassing would not obtain if the child were in a crib rather than a womb. We do not permit homeowners, merely because the home is indeed their property, to throw babies out of upper story windows, nor to starve them to death.
By the same logic, we do not permit airline pilots to pitch stowaways out of the cargo hatch in mid-flight.
If so, then the duty to rear the child obtains whenever the child is in existence. If the child can be harmed before birth, then the parent is duty-bound to take reasonable steps to forestall such harm; nor does the citizenship, legitimacy, capacity of the child excuse the parent from his duty, even if the child is regarded as a trespasser.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
