10.15.2007

Lawyer to Represent Fetus. Payment contingent on term.

A lawyer will appear before a CA court representing a fetus on Tuesday. There are about a million problems with this legally, so for poops and palpitations, let's look at some of them:


  1. Who hired the guy? A parent can obtain legal representation for a child, but that person must be then shielded from the legal decision-making. I'd love to see the ethics panel take this up.
  2. He's suing claiming that fetus is a person and has standing to fight abortion in court. Consider this: if he wins, that means that lawyers all over the country can claim fetus of mothers slated to have abortions as their clients. Then, they can haul mom into court and attempt to force her to have the baby. Before you argue that mom can decide for her children, note that if she wants an abortion, that would be murder of the child. That pits her against the child and renders her an unfit parent.
  3. On the other hand, hijaking a woman's womb could be a form of slavery. I only bring this up because the lawyer is actually making this argument on the other side -- that mothers enslave fetuses when they choose abortion, violating the Thirteenth Amendment. If fetuses are enslaved, shouldn't all mothers abort them as soon as possible so as to free them?
  4. How does this man know what the best interests of the fetus really are? Even a guardian ad litem (lawyer for kids in a divorce or similar proceeding) has to attempt to discern their wishes. I don't know that we can assume every fetus would want to be born.
  5. If the fetus is born and ends up being of an opposite socio-political persuasion, does it have a cause of action against the lawyer for being used in this manner?

And you thought this man was just a kook.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The case is actually more about the funding of stem-cell research. Should this guy win, and get the courts to agree that the embryos are people, then they would need to find loads of women quickly to carry all them to term. You can't put a baby in a freezer! That would be abuse! Instead we can enslave the women, who would be hijacked by a uterine parasite (best "Onion" term ever).

ShareThis