And that means that, yes, I would support a woman's choice to have an unassisted pregnancy, to not have modern prenatal care (really, didn't women have babies for millenia without this?), and, frankly, any other wise or unwise decision they want. If some of the stupider ones die off, well, all the better.

We, as a society, MUST trust women to make their own health care decisions...because who else shall we trust to make them?

For many of us, it really is that simple - unless we start assigning rights to the unborn that supercede those of the born.

I can see no reason to do that, ever, and I still - after all these years - feel passionately that the impulse to do so is fundamentally, poisonously anti-woman.

I was so heartened to see the pro-choice community come out in force in response to Frances Kissling's unfortunate article, and I can only hope this issue will evoke a similar response.

Thanks for keeping up the dialogue.

It's good to see so many woman who feel as I do come here to speak up.

"Even if one believes that opting for unassisted childbirth is "utterly foolish," or that the Quiverfull ideology it goes along with is "warped and misguided," it comes down to the same question that's always at the heart of debates over reproductive rights: Do we, as a society, trust women to make their own health care decisions?"

The sticky wicket here is that it's not merely a woman's own health care at stake here, it's also the health of her unborn child. If an adult woman wants to put her ovarian cancer in God's hands, fine. I don't see a profoundly misguided decision to have a high-risk homebirth without any prenatal care or midwife present as the same thing.

You're not allowed to withhold treatment for various illnesses for your children. It's illegal, because the rights of your kid trump your parental rights in those instances. There are border cases/gray area, but you'd have to be pretty far to the limited-government-power-side to say that parents have absolute freedom about medical decisions affecting their kids - which having an unassisted birth certainly qualifies as.

Abortion is a different issue than withholding medical care (for yourself and your almost-born baby). Infanticide isn't legal anywhere, and there are at least some states, if not all, where third-trimester abortions without medical reasons are also illegal. If there's a good case to be made that not having any medical care significantly increases the chances of major injury/death to the baby, then it's not ridiculous to argue for the baby's rights trumping that of the baby's parents.

Sure - in the history of people, medical care of the sort we have now is quite recent. But then again, death in childbirth (to baby and mother) used to be a lot more common.

As an aside, I have a mess of a cousin who did just this - didn't get prenatal care and just showed up at the hospital to have the baby. No O.B., no nothing. Child Protective Services wouldn't let her bring the child home without a home investigation and checked in on (i.e. investigated) her for ages afterwards.

"'[D]o we not become as extremist as we say they are? Is there not, in an ethical sense, an important weighing of women's rights and needs against a respect for life, even the life of nonpersons? Is there a point in pregnancy when our respect for life might outweigh a woman's right to make this choice?' The solidly pro-choice answers are no, no, and no."

With due respect, Ms. Harding, I think you're off the mark. I find it hard to believe that anyone would fight for the right of a woman in her 9th month of pregnancy, who faces no danger to life or health, who was not the victim of rape or incest, and whose fetus is healthy to have an abortion. I consider myself about as pro-choice as they come, but that's a step too far: there is quite obviously a point in pregnancy when our respect for life might outweigh a woman's right to make this choice, (subject to other considerations, such as those above.) The belief of anti-choice protesters and activists that some people _would_ fight for the right of any woman to terminate in such an extreme case is exactly what gives the anti-choice movement power and persuasiveness to moderate Americans, any of whom would be rightly appalled by such a choice.

Here in MN we just had a family arrested for refusing chemo to a minor child with cancer. Where exactly is the bright line between that medical procedure and a extremely risky birthing process?

Sometimes you don't have the right and really it is NOT kinda like the whole head scarf thing. Ornaments is symbology distasteful as it is for me, unassisted childbirth is death and utterly preventable one

As I trust bulimics, cutters, psychotics, suicidal depressives, hallucinating drug addicts in withdrawal, and the unconscious or comatose. "I'm not letting the midwife in because I didn't hear her ask for a midwife."

I think that sentence "it's not dogmatic because I agree with it" (or however you phrased it) has to be the best sentence in broadsheet for some time.

Just for the curious:

Dogmatic, adj.: inclined to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true.

Dogmatic, adj.: of or pertaining to a system of principles or tenets, a specific tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down, or a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle.

"Incontrovertible" is a fine word.

Back when families profited from dozens of children it was not atypical to expose a burdensome infant to the elements, and that's much safer than an abortion. Why did times change?

"I find it hard to believe that anyone would fight for the right of a woman in her 9th month of pregnancy, who faces no danger to life or health, who was not the victim of rape or incest, and whose fetus is healthy to have an abortion."

I would fight for that right.

If the fetus can be delivered and survive, it has a right to life.

If it can't, it doesn't.

Some of us who are mothers and teachers and social workers and nurses feel precisely that way, because otherwise the only possible conclusion to be drawn is that any woman who terminates under those conditions is a murderer, and that the murderer should instead be forced to give birth.

I am pro-woman, and so I am pro-choice.

All arguments that explicitly or implicitly render women unfit to make decisions about their own bodies will always be more abhorrent to be than any form of abortion.