[OnyxCougar]

My husband brought this point up last night:

The generalisation here is that we're doing this to druggies/people who have been convicted of neglect, etc. So ostensibly, to protect the children. This includes children in the womb, yes? Can't be having those women knowingly and willingly doing hard drugs, not caring about their fetus, right?

Then you must concede that what is in the womb is a child (the one you're saying you want to protect), therefore, if taken to it's logical conclusion, you are pro-life.

IOW, if you're advocating forced sterilization to prevent harm to children/unborn babies, you're also advocating preventing them from being killed in healthy mothers.

My husband says you can't have it both ways. Either it's a child at conception, and we protect it from druggie mothers and abusive husbands (charging him for murder if he kills it in the womb), and should enact provisions to prevent it from neglect/abuse, or it's merely an embryo until the moment it is released from the mother (via vaginal or ceserean delivery), and it is afforded no protection until that time.

In addition, glatt is right in that we are talking about PERMANENT solutions here, because even if we put norplant in, the woman can carve it out of herself. This means that the idea of "until she is off drugs for a year" won't work.

Also, something else I thought of....the question was brought up as to what would constitute "retarded" enough to employ the sterilisation, and I think that would be if a person was unable to care for themselves at all, needed 24/7 care, then they most certainly should not be having children.

Again, I agree with the intent of the process, but don't agree with the implementation. You can either live in a free society or not. I choose to live in a free society. If I wanted to be denied the choice of having children or not, I'd go live in the Middle East and get my clitoris cut out and be denied an education and a whole bunch of other things I take for granted as a British/American citizen.