No it isn’t. The person throwing the child is guilty of assault. This is nowhere near the same situation.
So if a five-year-old can’t be held responsible and killed for hitting its mother by being thrown at her, because it was the dad who threw it, then how can a fetus be held responsible and killed for existing and causing harm to the mother, even though it never chose to exist at all and was conceived by another person?
Because a fetus isn’t a person. Until birth it is considered a part of the mother, specifically to prevent stupid and unsustainable rulings like this one. If your mother was killed by cancer, are you going to take her tumor to court and put it in prison? No, you wouldn’t, that would be ridiculous. Because a tumor can’t choose its actions. Neither can a fetus.
After development and birth, when the child can think and act for itself, sure it’s a person. Inside the womb? It is an organ, it acts and thinks like an organ (by which I mean, it doesn’t) and can hold no legal responsibility for anything because it is not a thinking being.
Do I find this to be sad? Sure, absolutely. I’d prefer every fetus in the world to be loved and wanted and born without complication into a life of ease. But you and I both know very well that that is not the reality of the world.
The entire argument here is that if we consider a fetus a person, then we should apply self-defense laws to pregnancies. I’m pointing out why “self defense” against a person who has done literally nothing is ridiculous. I was writing my previous posts under the assumption that a fetus is a person, the same as in the original post.
But I also believe that there’s no point in drawing arbitrary lines in the sand where a human organism/being/whatever you’d like to call it becomes a person. The minute you do that, it opens the door to whoever is writing the rules this week to decide things like “humans who are in a coma aren’t people anymore” or “humans without a certain level of intellectual ability aren’t people.” That isn’t a level of authority that I would entrust to any mortal human being. Would you?
Organs are components of an organism that support its life functions. A fetus is not a component of an organism, but is an organism unto itself. If it were an organ, then it would be something a woman is born with and develops naturally as she grows. Women are born with egg cells, true, but they don’t become fetuses until they are fertilized and undergo a degree of development.
