Some of the recent pro-choice threads have got me thinking. I was reading an older thread where it was agreed pretty much that pregnant women should be left alone -- it's utterly their choice whether to continue the pregnancy, terminate, smoke, drink alcohol, even do crack cocaine, it's all up to her and society has no business intervening.
Compare this with psychiatry where a person often has absolutely no choice about what substances she wants to put into (or remove from) her body. What is it about pregnancy that supercedes society's perceived interests? Why is it okay for a pregnant woman to drink alcohol just because she's lucky enough not to have a psychiatric label (although one could argue that such irresponsibility should be worthy of such a label) even though society clearly benefits by her having a healthy pregnancy, i.e. reducing the risk of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?
By way of comparison, I was forced to take antipsychotic injections (under threat of incarceration) when there is no such clear societal benefit. Despite what Big Pharma and the mental death industry would have you believe, the long range outcomes for serious mental illness are vastly better without conventional treatment.
I would think that what's true for pregnant women should be true for society as a whole. It's my body so get your hands (and hypodermic needles) off it.
Disturbingly, even though eugenics was pretty much cancelled in BC in the 1970s, there are still cases occasionally (in the States and the UK and I am guessing here in Canada too) where the government has sought to force abortions and sterilizations of the "mentally unfit." So you can go ahead and smoke crack if you're deemed worthy but look out if you've been psychiatrically labelled. At one point, I was offered a hysterectomy because "people like [me] shouldn't have children." Can you imagine if a normal woman was told that by her doctor? The doctor would be hauled before the Canadian Medical Assocation.