Mary said: 
“Here's an argument I use to defend abortion sometimes: What about a pregnant woman who has purposely very bad nutrition? Should she also be punished, as she is assaulting the fetus? I'm not developing the argument here, but the purpose is to make the pro-lifer prove that the state can regulate pregnancy.”

My response:
This really made me think. I read your email right after getting out of bed, and spent my morning getting ready for work considering this statement. I’ve never heard someone submit that argument, and it was quite thought provoking. My wife Hannah likes to get up and have coffee with me before I go to work, so I asked what she thought about it, and she had some basic thoughts from her experience and research about pregnancy.

We’ve had two pregnancies, resulting in three babies (if you’ll excuse what some consider over-emotionalized language) and one child that lived to birth. First pregnancy ended in a 10-week miscarriage, and the last one was as far as we know, a first-time medical event called a “heterotopic pregnancy” meaning we had an ectopic embryo die at 7 weeks while at the same time carried another baby in the womb. That child is our 9-month old son, Noah. (see pic)

Anyway, Hannah did a lot of research about healthy pregnancy during the second pregnancy because she couldn’t imagine how devastating two miscarriages in a row would be. What she learned was that for the most part, good nutrition is a bit overrated during pregnancy. Outside of a few things like alcohol and mercury, practically none of what a pregnant woman eats is transferred to the fetus. A pregnant woman is more helped by eating healthy and drinking water than the fetus is.

All that to say, I don’t think nutrition should be regulated during pregnancy. (nor when a woman is not pregnant for that matter.) But there are some things that are regulated that are known to be lethal or very dangerous to the fetus, like thalidomide. (Not sure it’s illegal, but doctors won’t give it.) I’m okay with cautionary measures like that, and I don’t think a doctor not giving Accutane to a pregnant woman is an unfair burden on her bodily rights. You?