devil's advocate time

Reading yet another story about South Dakota's anti-abortion laws, my evil side thought of a new twist on oine of my old arguments about why we can't live with the consequences of *really* acting as if a fetus is a human with full rights.

Ok, the law they've passed only allows abortions to save the life of the mother... but not if her health is "merely" endangered.

Given that many of the ways that a woman's health can be in jeopardy during pregnancy can suddenly turn lethal, and that (as I recall) the baby can be saved rather more often than the mother...

The surviving babies should be tried (or sued, as the case may be) for the death or severe damage of their mothers. Crazy? No more so than these laws.

Far too many of the "pro-life" camp are actually in favor of giving the "baby" more rights than the mother. And I find their motives *highly* suspect as they seem to be far more easily explained by wanting to exert control over women than by their claimed morality.

If only this was real.

Punish your Microsoft developer

Of course to *really* be effective, there'd have to be a way to direct part of the punishment up the chain. Say, the supervisor gets it once for every 10 times his underlings do, and so on up the chain...