>>742
"It's not her job to create a perfect body."
Whatever mother smokes, baby smokes. Whatever mother drinks, baby drinks.. etc. No, it isn't her job to create a perfect body, but she should not be allowed to cause direct serious long term harm to another person.
"Life is life and the child should settle for it."
Wow fucking easy for you to say. I have a better idea: she caused the problem, and made a victim out of her child? Make her pay compensation to unfuck her fuckup.
"Taking money from her is not going to help one bit - she is obliged to parenting and that is that."
Yes it will. If the child's life when it is older gets fucked up, she will then be forced to pay compensation. This will help the child.
"You infer what you want here, she *could* say mercury caused the damage,"
Lets compare probabilities. Assuming mercury poisoning is so widespread, if it is a greater risk than FAS/FAE, there must be widespread deformities equivalent to or greater than there would be if mothers smoked/drank while pregnant, right? So lets take 100 examples of women who smoked or drank while pregnant in a non-mercury contaminated environment, and compare it to 100 normal mothers from the USA who didn't smoke or drink while pregnancy, and were exposed to this evil mercury poisoning you talk about. Who do you suppose will have more deformities (if any) among the bunch? Obviously, it is ridiculous to blame this on mercury poisoning if the woman was known to be smoking and or drinking while pregnant.
"and we *can* prove her wrong - assuming we want to pay for the investigation, which I won't."
See above.
"Jail-time is more expensive than treatment+work, if you want the satisfaction of vindication - you cough up."
See my new suggestion in previous post. That + compensation is a great solution.
"She still doesn't have a responsibility to create a perfect body"
That's right. But she *does* have a responsibility to *not* do things that knowingly will deform or cause harm to the future person, like drinking and smoking obviously do.
"I still don't think money helps, but OK, as a principle I can concur."
I'm quoting this and saying, for the record, XEL AGREES WITH COMPENSATION.