Parliament has passed no law conferring upon the fetus the status of a person. No person, no rights.

Of course, if it survives until birth, the child will become a legal person, albeit one without a functioning central nervous system, and will then be entitled to the full protection of the law. But not until then. Or not until Parliament changes the law: whichever come first. Just leave the court out of it. To step in before the child is born, wrote the majority in its decision, would involve the court in a radical extension of the rights acknowledged under the common law, a task "best left to Parliament." The court is not always so unwilling to step into the legislative breach. It did not hesitate, for example, to introduce a radical change in the legal status of the fetus in 1988, when it overturned federal restrictions on abortion. Nor, for that matter, did it wait upon the legislature when it came to recognizing women as "persons," two generations ago. In deferring to the legislature, it appears, the court is a little like your old deaf grandfather: it hears what it wants to.

It's understandable the court should be so reluctant to involve itself in this case. After all, as the majority wrote, this would entail a delicate weighing of competing rights and interests. Let's see: on the one hand, the mother would endure a few weeks' forced abstention from her preferred solvent. On the other, her child would be spared a lifetime as a vegetable. You can see the conundrum.

And there is always the danger of the slippery slope. If a woman with a history of chronic substance abuse, who has already given birth to three children, two born very nearly as brain-damaged as she, if that woman may be coaxed into a detox centre for the duration of her pregnancy, well, where would it all end? Would we send the police snooping through the liquor cabinets of every pregnant woman in the land? Would the precedent, as the court asked, allow children to sue for the harm to their upbringing arising from "a parent's undue fondness for the office or the golf course?" Actually, no. As the court's minority acidly remarked in its dissent, "in response to a query of where a reasonable line should be drawn, it was submitted that the pen should not even be lifted." The possibility that other, harder cases might some day cross the court's desk is not much of an argument for inaction in the face of a clear and present case of child abuse -- even if that entails some miminal restrictions on "a woman's right to control her body." It is an interesting moral universe we are constructing. Supporters of the court's ruling might note the anomaly that it would otherwise be legal to kill your unborn child, but not to maim it. But are we any closer to consistency as things stand, where it is legal to take a child's life one day before it is born, but infanticide one day after? Unless, of course, the child is born severely deformed, perhaps owing to the mother's enjoyment of her constitutional right to experiment with lighter fluids, at which point the advocates of 'mercy killing' will want their day in court.

In any event, when did we become so absolutist about the right to control one's own body? We can argue til dawn whether a fetus is a person or not, and therefore whether any human life other than the mother's is at issue. But the same people who howl at the injustice of denying epoxy to a pregnant woman seem to have no problem with the more general prohibition on drug use -- where it is indisputable that the user is the only person whose wellbeing is affected. Should we legalize heroin, but only for expectant mothers? Just what principle of freedom is at work here?

A moral portrait of the late twentieth century: an age when the law was invoked in a thousand ways to protect us from ourselves, but not to protect unborn children from their mothers; when it was illegal to ride a bike without a helmet, but a sacred liberty to bear a child with fetal alcohol syndrome.