Comments on: All Right, Peter: I’ll Bite

By: livingdonor101

livingdonor101 — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:17:00 +0000

A US judge (appointed by a republican president no less) ruled that since employers cannot control what employees do with their paychecks, which may result in said employee purchasing goods/services that the employer may find objectionable, and since health insurance is part of an employees’ compensation package (and since employees also pay for part of their insurance), employers could not deny coverage for health services they found objectionable.

Of course,she’s only one judge, and I’m fairly certain this mess will end up in front of the Supreme Court eventually, but at least there has been some lucidity in the judiciary about the matter.

By: Lindsay

Lindsay — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:59:00 +0000

I realise that Iain. I also recognise that a lot of employment practices that are common in the US but not so much here (but for how long?) seem to go against the principle. Think about drug testing of employees (where they don’t relate directly and immediately to, say the operation of heavy machinery), policies against tattoos (even if they are covered up at work) etc. etc. But I would be surprised if such a principle were not recognised in employment laws of US states as well. Also, I believe the Affordable Care Act give short shrift to employers who don’t want to pay for certain types of care–it is just that people are upset about that fact.

By: Iain Brassington

Iain Brassington — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:18:00 +0000

Yeah: these questions are taken originally from a US site, and there is a few cases of employers – who pay health insurance as part of the benefits package – stipulating that it won’t cover abortion (or, in some cases, contraception – think of the Rush Linbaugh brouhaha a few months ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh–Sandra_Fluke_controversy .) That’s the access provision, I think.

in effect, it does mean that people who aren’t paid enough lose access to birth control because of their employers preferences.

By: Lindsay

Lindsay — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:59:00 +0000

Interesting comment there, some I agree with, some not. Thing about employers, though, that’s just bonkers. One of the fundamental principles of employment law is that employment does not equal serfdom. That is why courts don’t compel performance employment contracts (although they will award damages for failure to perform). You say you are going to work, and you don’t and as a result your employer’s business closes until she hires a replacement, you will pay for the losses you caused, but no one will make you work–that would be slavery. The idea that employers should be able to determine what you do outside the employment relationship (barring a few special, justifiable circumstances strictly related to your employment duties) is just offensive.

By: Iain Brassington

Iain Brassington — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:48:00 +0000

Oooh – nice question.
I suppose that, were there to be a situation in which delivering the child alive and then having it adopted would be the means of ending the pregnancy that was the least invasive/ traumatic/ whatever, then there might be a moral case for a live birth being preferable to killing the foetus. Whether or not that’d ever be enforceable – morally or practically – is a different matter.

I guess my general thought would be that the case for not killing becomes stronger as the pregnancy progresses. But I’m not sure about translating that moral argument into a defensible legal one.

I guess there’s a parallel with the recent Catt case here. Viability might mean 24 weeks or so; in that case, I’ve a fairly powerful intuition that the foetus’ claim to life is fairly minimal. At 39 weeks, though… well, it might be stronger. But I think it’d always be rebuttable in principle.

Things get a bit more complicated if we go a bit sci-fi. Suppose that there was an incubator that could maintain a foetus from – say – six weeks, and that removing it from the womb alive and suitable for incubation was no more invasive than ending its life and removing it. In that case, there’d be no extra cost to the woman incurred by maintaining life: the procedure would, from her point of view, be just about the same. She’d still have the right not to be pregnant and to control her body – which is what I take the pro-choice arguments to be about: the question’d be how to remove and what to do with the thing with which she was pregnant. In that case, I think that pro-life arguments might potentially have more traction – not because the foetus had any particular right to life, but because ending its life seems arbitrary, and arbitrary actions that result in any death, be they to humans or mice, strike me as being morally iffy.

By: Christian Munthe

Christian Munthe — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:21:00 +0000

Just i little query on the 9 answer, since termination of pregnancy and death of the fetus/baby (we would call it a baby in case of a spontaneous abortion at this stage) do not necessarily coincide in case of viability. Do you mean yes to legal termination (and then keeping the fetus/baby alive on the same principle as in a case of spontaneous abortion at the same gestational age), or do you mean yes to legal termination of the pregnancy and then routine withholding of neonatal life-saving measures that would have been provided in otherwise similar cases, or do you mean yes to legal termination and further actions to ensure that the fetus/baby dies, whatever the prognosis of neonatal life-saving measures?