Mary said:  [Responding to my question on whether women should be allowed to take Thalidomide, an anti-nausea drug that causes birth defects.]
“Show me a woman who would take something that she knows would give her future baby birth defects. (excluding psychopaths and drug addicts). If a woman is pregnant and wants to carry to term, she is going to do everything she can for that child.”

My response:
I agree with you, but that’s not the point. I’m not making a judgment of these women, I’m just saying some might exist, for who knows what reason. If there are psychopaths and drug addicts that would take these drugs that cause birth defects, should we respond to that problem by not allowing them to take those drugs?

Mary said: “However, I could bring a lot of similar examples for this question. For example, should it be a crime for a pregnant woman to drink alcohol (i.e. fetal alcohol syndrome.)?”

My response: Honestly I haven’t done much research on this at all. I’m just listening to what my wife says, who apparently has done a lot of research. I wouldn’t publish these as real arguments unless I had sources and stuff, so if you come up with anything that refutes what I’m saying, I’m all ears. I don’t know a lot about FAS, but Hannah says this is one of those things that hasn’t really been proven either. The classic example is that 40 years ago before people knew about FAS, many women drank when they were pregnant and there’s not that many people diagnosed with FAS now. So is it possible that suddenly there’s this “fake syndrome” that someone has put out? I don’t know, I’m just saying there’s no real proof yet, as far as I know. It’s like the debate about peanut allergies. We send peanut butter over to poor tribes in Africa, and I guess someone recently asked them about peanut allergies, and they just kind of stared at the American and said, “yeah, we don’t have those here.” Maybe we’re a bunch of hypochondriacs. I don’t know.

All that to say, if it could be proven that drinking alcohol while pregnant did definitely harm the fetus, than I think it would be appropriate to not allow women to drink while pregnant. We don’t allow parents to give their underage kids alcohol. (may be unenforceable, but there’s still a reason we say it’s a bad idea.) I don’t think we should try to control every aspect of a pregnant woman’s life, forcing her to eat the “most healthy possible foods” for the fetus. But if something like thalidomide or Accutane or alcohol is known to harm the fetus, than yes, she should not be able to take those things. What do you think? Is that unreasonable?