HW 34- Some Initial Thoughts On Birth

When I think of birth, the first bubbles that come to mind are issues such as abortion, the rate of teen pregnancy that is currently so high, and the people I know who have recently experienced the process of giving birth. Then I started to think about how all of these things are tied together. Although one of the people I know who just gave birth was 21, which can be (in my opinion) a perfectly reasonable age to raise a child, the other was only 17. This idea led me to the question of why people do not choose to get an abortion when their living situation clearly is not ideal for supporting a child, or the parents are not mature enough. My brainstorming on answering this question included the idea that maybe the mother of the child felt some sort of attachment to it... after it is their baby, but this is not something that I will ever be able to understand fully. Another reason could be that they feel bad about robbing the fetus of the potential it has when it grows up to become a "self-functioning" human like us, or that they feel like they are killing the baby.

The thought about whether or not it is right to "kill the baby" before it is born brings up a lot of other questions. For instance, after how many months is a baby considered alive, or is it not until it leaves the mother's body? This is a key point in the common argument of whether abortion should be a legal option or not (which is a completely different argument from whether abortion is morally right or not) I am also wondering what kind of dominant social practices there are that are associated with birth that are not quite as "normal" as we take for granted, because there have been multiple "weirdnesses" in the last two units. Why are almost all the children born today born in hospitals? And if the answer is simply for hygenic or medical reasons, then why would any child be born at home? I'm sure those two question could potentially relate to our previous unit on illness and dying, especially financially. Considering the amount of money that is invested into the care of the dying, how much money is invested into the care of those who are just being born, and how are they treated? It is clear that I have many questions involving birth, and am curious to see what I will find out.