Friday, 12 August 2022

Do we need our consent to be born?

Could people claim they didn't give their consent to be born?


To be clear, this is a thought experiment, not a suggestion.

Consent is an important legal (and social) concept: nothing should happen to your own body or own life without your own explicit, uncoerced agreement. If someone breaks consent, there are judicial consequences. Suing and imprisonment, for example.

At the crux of it, we can't give our concent to be born because we don't exist yet. So if someone doesn't wish to be alive, could they sue their parents?

Legally, children can't give consent until they become adults. Until that point, the child's parent/guardian provides the child's consent for it. Babies are children (obviously) so if the parents consented to have the child, then legally the child's consent for its own life has been given.

A child born of rape would not be alive via consent so they could potentially sue the rapist parent. Maybe one could argue consent is given if the mother goes through with the birth but what about places where abortion is severely restricted or even illegal?

These dilemmas aren't practical for real life but it's good exercise for the mind, thinking through actions and consequences to their limit.

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