Reply #139: quite the ass-umption there [View All]

You wouldn't accept the "greater burden" argument if the roles were reversed, but you find it perfectly okay as long as it favors your viewpoint.

Sez who?

You?


Only a tiny, miniscule fraction of pregnancies are dangerous.

Not so, friend.

Only a small fraction of pregnancies result in immediate, serious physical injury or death.

All pregnancies are risky. (And many pregnancies lead to circumstances in which women's lives are shortened, or perhaps just women made unhealthy and unhappy, as a result of poverty and isolation and other disadvantages they would not have suffered had they not had an unwanted child, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

Like my sister's famous pregnancy. "Normal" and very healthy all the way through, attended by doctors and midwives at every step of the way. Not the tiniest indication of problems on the horizon, other than a touch of gestational diabetes. (Oh, that's right; some women do acquire rather serious medical conditions during pregnancy that sometimes do have lasting effects on their health, not to mention life expectancy.) Too healthy perhaps; it turned out the fetus was humongous and just wouldn't come out, despite hours of hard labour. A century ago, my sister would have been dead, and there would have been no baby. In the dying years of the last century, the doctors had a vacuum thingy that got it out when she'd turned down forceps and they were just about to do a caesarian section. (Oh, that's right, you know: major surgery, with all the attendant risks of infection and what not.)

No one could have predicted in a million years that my sister's pregnancy would become life-threatening in its last hours. Nor could anyone have predicted that the woman in the next room would come close to bleeding to death when she haemorrhaged after a routine episiotomy. Nor did my friend's niece in Africa expect to die of a post-partum haemorrhage around the same time. But she did.

So we have miraculous modern medicine, and if she'd had that haemorrhage in Toronto instead of in the back woods of Cameroon, she would probably have lived. I wonder what circumstances you might like to have forced on YOU against your will that might land you up in a situation in which it takes a good helping of modern medicine to keep you alive ... and it just might not.

So I wonder what you might have had in mind when you said that stuff about "If the burden were greater on the man". I wonder just what such a burden might be. Maybe compelling him to donate part of his liver to save his child's life once it's born? That might be approaching comparable. But oh, that's right; we don't do that.


I do hate to come late to these discussions, but they're just so damned much fun I can't resist.