The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Rachel

The courts have long held that parents cannot be compelled to take actions to benefit their children’s health. In two key cases, the courts refused to force a father to donate a kidney to his dying child and declined even to make parents move to a new climate to aid their ailing child. “To compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded,” the judge wrote in one such decision. “To do so, would defeat the sanctity of the individual.” It was apparently less of a legal leap to intrude upon the body of a pregnant woman.