Collaborative Learning Community: Rights of a Fetus

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

a)    Rights of a fetus have during each month of the prenatal period

According to Kurjak and. Chervenak (2006) the unborn child doesn’t have constitutional rights. A fetus not having the right to life doesn’t mean it should not be catered for in matters pertaining its survival. Both the mother and child ought to be healthy and allowed to get appropriate medical support. The right to life is a most important human right as it becomes key to the enjoyment of all other human rights. International human rights law shows this right to life as the basic right accrued at birth and any prenatal protections must be consistent with women’s human rights. When the right to life of a fetus is extended to before birth, then women’s human rights are threatened. These efforts are essential to safeguarding women’s fundamental rights to life, health, dignity, equality, and autonomy.

 In many cases, pregnancy termination is outlawed yet there are some attempts to justify restrictions on access to family planning methods. These strategies work towards denying women the right to making decisions regarding their fertility coupled with a disregard for their basic human rights. The common law stipulates that a fetus has contingent legal interests but has no rights by law until they are born. The death of the fetus cannot be considered as grievous bodily harm to the mother. However, in spite of the legislative changes, the contention over embryo and fetal rights at law will not dissipate anytime soon (Kurjak and. Chervenak 2006). 

b)    Should the development of the child’s senses be considered part of the pro-choice/pro-life debate

Alden (2016) demonstrated that many people base the pro-life issue with the senses of the fetus become the main debate.  Life begins at conception, which is long before the fetus has any senses.  However, the argument states that the senses of the fetus ought to play a major role in the pro-life debate. It is wrong to kill an innocent human being, but few understand the certainty of when a fetus becomes human. The issue of the fetus’s senses should be regarded to have an impact on when the fetus is human. The more the fetus has senses, the more the abortion should be opposed.

Further Alden (2016) illustrated that the issue of what rights a fetus has should increases as it gets closer to the full term of the pregnancy.  It is not easy to determine what rights a fetus has at each point in pregnancy, in part because one cannot say exactly how human the fetus is at each moment.  The debate argues that a newly fertilized egg has essentially no rights and therefore “morning-after pill” should be legal without restrictions.  In contradiction, there are proposed laws that a fetus has been developing for nine months is mostly human with equal rights of a newborn infant. In some jurisdictions, legislation sometimes tries to determine the right to life of the fetus from the moment of fertilization. Such legislation regards the fetus as a live person whose legal status is equal to that of any person of the human race. Based on all human rights, the fetus has more rights the longer it develops inside the womb.

c)    The rights the embryo/fetus should have

Fatemeh and Marzieh (2016) illustrated that fetus right should be protected by law and from the moment of conception. “Wrongful Life” is a complex law area that concerns unborn children. Wrongful life is a term used in legal action where a doctor or a hospital gets sued for allowing severely disabled baby to be born. Usually, it is the parents who will sue the doctor or hospital for not informing them about the disability during pregnancy. The purpose of the litigation was to provide financial compensation for the disabled child and the parents. The unborn child has no right to life when contraception gets used to stop its conception. If there is a right to life, then contraception is denying this right. Had many parents used contraception, many people wouldn’t have been born. The church has been against contraception for it views it as an act of killing. 

Further before conception, you may say that since sperm contains the potential for life, masturbation can be considered as denying the unborn child’s right to life. The Church condemns masturbation which shows an absurdity of the right to life. If many parents did not have sex on the day of conception of their children, their children would not have been born. If many parents chose to remain celibate, there would be less or no children in the world. In so doing it would mean that lives of the unborn child are hence violating the fetus rights. In fact, simply by using family planning methods will make the unborn a thing or rather they don’t exist. Many unborn children were never born because of being out to luck and faced the actions of history. Singling out abortion as the main cause of this is wrong. Condoms prevent unborn children from experiencing the gift of life (Fatemeh and Marzieh, 2016).

   According to Nova (2016) one of the truths about abortion is that every abortion does not automatically lead to one less child being born. Most women have abortions tend to have the same number of children they would get on a later date in life. Most young women who get abortions believe they differing get a child to a later date. Most women obtain abortions as a way of postponing childbearing not to prevent it altogether. In this sense, abortion is a postponement of childbearing. The anti-abortion groups show that the unborn have a right to be born because they believed denying the unborn the right to life is equal to murder. For all the fetuses who get killed, anti-abortion groups ought to call for the arrest of every woman who procures an abortion and the doctors who help in procuring the said abortion. Claiming that it is wrong to deny the unborn child a right to life is incorrect because any possible action preventing future children from being born is wrong. If the unborn have a right to life then surely celibacy is a crime for preventing future children from being born. Most anti-abortion groups know the flaws becomes logic, and thus the debate switches from claiming the unborn fetus’s rights to arguing that the fetus is already alive.

References

Kurjak, A. & A. Chervenak, F. (2006). Perinatal Medicine (2nd ed.)

Alden, B. (2016). Unborn & Unprotected: The Rights Of The Fetus Under in 1983. Gcal.summon.serialssolutions.com. Retrieved 17 November 2016, from http://gcal.summon.serialssolutions.com/#!/search?bookMark=ePnHCXMw42JgAfZbU5lAk7ng0y-NTFjAk7yGusC2gwEHrJQ0B1Z9nAzWoX5O_kF-CmoKoX4BQf4hrs7A_GqlEOLhqhDk6e4REqzg7wbmubmGhAYrgBfeKxxargDsKhtzM4QARZ09dKG3BugWWJgb66akGFqkAfsxhqmmwGLXxBRYCZgkWiRamJkBOxqJwDyVlmZmlpZoaJxikmSekmYBKrpTgHVeilFqWppJKmgCWgliLKxojofGanE86E4fSyPQJXgAl6s7RA

Fatemeh, G. & Marzieh, A. (2016). The Rights of the Fetus: Ensoulment as the Cut-Off Point Legislation on Abortion Running Title: The Rights of the Fetus. ProQuest Central. Retrieved 17 November 2016, from http://The Rights of the Fetus: Ensoulment as the Cut-Off Point Legislation on Abortion Running Title: The Rights of the Fetus

NOVA,. (2016). The Miracle of Life (1983), by NOVA | The Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Embryo.asu.edu. Retrieved 17 November 2016, from https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/miracle-life-1983-nova