The Pregnancy Criminalization Law is none of the government's business

Arguments:(1)Pro's rebuttal to this argument is based on the same two misconceptions that lead her to believe that the Walker paper was favorable to the Pro side in the first place. The first misconception is the argument that "No studies have shown that prenatal cocaine exposure causes unique developmental dysfunction..." [emphasis mine]. This statement is correct, but it actually supports the proposition that I am defending here. What Walker says is that cocaine causes no unique development dysfunction - that is, no developmental dysfunctions that are unique to cocaine. This statement is intended to be read as a refutation of the idea that "crack babies" are somehow more damaged than infants prenatally exposed to other dangerous drugs. In no way is Walker arguing that cocaine does not cause developmental dysfunction.The second misconception is that uncertainty about the effects of one particular drug (cocaine) is sufficient to show that a law concerned with the effects of narcotics in general is fundamentally flawed. Even if it were somehow proven that cocaine exposure does not have any deleterious effects on fetuses, this would only suggest that a small modification of the law to make an exception for cocaine is in order. It would not mean that the law is on balance disadvantageous, because there are so many other drugs about which the dangers are well established. Additionally, the jury is far from out over the effects of prenatal exposure to cocaine. Although the effects were once greatly exaggerated, that does not warrant an extreme shift in the other direction. Many risk factors previously associated with cocaine have been found to result from other factors - but far from all. According to Wikipedia, prenatal cocaine exposure has been definitely linked to premature birth ("17-27% of cocaine using pregnant women deliver prematurely"), spontaneous abortion, low birth weight, fetal vitamin deficiencies, respiratory distress syndrome, and infarction of the bowels. "The increased risk of placental abruption with cocaine use has been well documented". [1]Wikipedia has a number of internal citations backing up these statements - I cannot provide them myself because many are medical papers behind paywalls or print books.What Pro's sources are telling us is that certain disabilities commonly associated with prenatal cocaine exposure have not mean scientifically validated. This my no means suggests that there are no developmental problems associated with cocaine use at all.(2)Pro asks for studies demonstrating that prenatal exposure to narcotics is dangerous. Ask, and ye shall receive:[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]This is what I could find by searching for a few minutes with minimal effort and no with no experience looking up medical studies. All of these papers clearly state in their abstracts that the effects of the drugs they studied are both harmful and definitive. By no stretch of the imagination is this "just a theory".Anyway, that question should properly have gone under the previous argument. My argument (2) is "The government should punish people who willfully cause harm to others." So far as I can tell, Pro does not actually have a response to that argument - her rebuttals just pertain to argument (1). She does have a few comments that seem vaguely related. For example:"What the government is doing is taking her freedom away just because they, and others, don't like what she does with her own child and own life."This seems very dubious as an argument against the idea that the government should punish people who harm others. Would it be a violation of a mother's freedom to punish her for beating her child so severely as to cause permanent mental and physical damage? Of course not. So why would it be a violation of her freedom to punish her for taking drugs that, as per argument (1), have the same effect? In both cases, she intentionally does something that she knows will cause harm to her child. Protecting that child's right to be free from harm should take priority over allowing the mother to do absolutely anything she wants.(3)A lot of Pro's comments under this rebuttal section seem random and only tangentially related to the debate. For example, I have no idea what Pro's belief that "[p]eople should be free to purchase health insurance across state lines" has to do with this debate. This strikes me as having been copy-pasted from a political platform of some kind. Regardless, I move that voters should take Pro's derailing of the debate into account when awarding the Arguments and Conduct points if more irrelevant content is posted in the next round.Pro also offers more arguments that properly belong in the rebuttal of argument (1). Specifically, large portions of this rebuttal concern the effects of prenatal exposure to marijuana. Some of the studies I introduced under argument (2) cover this topic. I also introduced sources backing up my argument that marijuana has harmful effects on fetuses in Round 2. Pro has no introduced any competing sources on this question, and I have more than satisfied her request for reputable sources of my own, so I think it would be redundant for me to address this topic for a third time.Nothing that Pro says in this rebuttal actually relates to the thesis of (3) - "The government has an interest in preserving public health." The closest thing to a contradiction of this statement that Pro offers is "[w]e favour restoring and reviving a free market health care system." Pro does not actually defend her belief that a free market healthcare system would be favorable in any way. However, there is no need to even debate the issue. The government still has an interest in promoting public health even if it may no do so through regulation of the healthcare sector of the economy. I have opted to justify the so-called "Pregnancy Criminalization Act" on the basis that it protects newborns from harm. This is a matter of criminal law, not off regulation of the health-care sector. Even in a country with a free market healthcare system, the government would be within its authority to take public health concerns into account when determining criminal law.Rebuttals:Pro has dropped all of my rebuttals. There are some statements in her rebuttals that might constitute defenses of some of her original arguments, and I have addressed them there. However, Pro has for the post part failed to offer any defense of her arguments in Round 2. Therefore, I simply extent these arguments. Pro has time to answer my rebuttals in the next round. Although it would normally be considered bad conduct to drop arguments and pick them up again, I will ask that voters not penalize Pro for doing so if she so chooses. However, if Pro never responses to these rebuttals at all, then voters must favor the Con side by default.Sources:[1] http://tinyurl.com...;[2] http://tinyurl.com...;[3] http://tinyurl.com...;[4] http://tinyurl.com...;[5] http://tinyurl.com...;[6] http://tinyurl.com...;[7] http://tinyurl.com...;[8] http://tinyurl.com...;