Fetal Personhood: Where birth choices and abortion choices meet

There is a very interesting post on RH Reality Check today that reviews the American Medical Association's recent decision to push for legislation criminalizing home birth.

Here is the text of the AMA's Resolution 205 on Home Birth.

How do beliefs and legislation like this gain support? Amie Newman suggests that as soon as a fetus gains legal protections which trump a pregnant woman's right to self-determination, a birthing mother loses all her power to make critical decisions about how and where her baby should be born.

Can you have it both ways? If I am not intelligent, critical or responsible enough to consider when it is the correct time to bring new life into the world through my body, how can I be trusted to know the best, most appropriate way to birth my baby into the world? Who should be trusted? Who gets to decide?

Let's revisit a question that was posed for anti-abortion protesters in a widely circulated video and essay.

Illegal home birth--how much time should she do?

Nell

Comments

[Brenda]

I would have loved to give birth to my daughter at home. I feel it is my right as a woman and mother to decide how and where I give birth at. I also feel like my rights have been stolen away. Birth is natural not a life threatning condition which I know will be argued because what if....well I am woman, mother and I know what is right for me and my baby

[reeciebird]

Thank you for articulating some of my thoughts on this resolution. It's a woman's right and responsibility to choose not only when to have children, but how. If a woman can have an elective c-section but not an elective home birth... isn't that criminalizing the act of giving birth? Could I be arrested because I gave birth? I researched the risks of various birth options and chose the set of risks I was comfortable with. I also resent the implication that these lobbies and organizations care more about the safety of our children than we do.

I love my children (and why do I feel I must point that out?) but don't feel their in utero rights trumped my own. They were a part of me.