Will artificial wombs change the terms of the abortion debate?

That’s the contention of this piece by Wendy Mcelroy (via Speculative Catholic):

Science will not make the abortion debate go away. The conflict is too deep and involves such fundamental questions of ethics and rights as, “What is a human life?” “Can two ‘human beings’ — a fetus and the pregnant woman — claim control over the same body?” and “When does an individual with rights come into existence?” These questions are beyond the scope of science.

Nevertheless, technology can impact the debate in at least two ways. First, it can explore ways to end a pregnancy without destroying the fetus, which may then be sustained; if such procedures became accessible and inexpensive (or financed by adoptive ‘parents’), then abortion rates would likely decline…and sharply.

Second, it may offer “an out” for activists on both sides who sincerely wish to resolve the debate and not merely scream at each other at ever increasing shrillness.

Many pro-choice women, like me, have been deeply disturbed by ultrasound scan photos that show fetuses, at earlier than once thought periods of gestation, sucking their thumbs, appearing to smile and otherwise resembling a full-term baby. Many of us would welcome alternate procedures and forms of ectogenesis as long as they remained choices. And as long as both parental rights and parental responsibilities could be relinquished.

For their part, pro-life advocates who are sincerely bothered by the totalitarian implications of monitoring pregnant women and demolishing doctor-client privilege might well jump at a technological solution.

Such activists may be surprised to find allies where enemies once existed.

Of course, some pro-choice feminists will reject the possibility without discussion, and for one reason. Many states ban abortion once the fetus has achieved viability. Since ectogenesis pushes viability back to the embryo stage, all abortions might become illegal. That would constitute a catastrophic political defeat.

Moreover, many pro-life advocates will oppose new reproductive technologies as dehumanizing, unnatural, and against their religious beliefs.

To date, the most notable thing about activists’ response to new reproductive technologies has been the lack of it, especially when compared to the clamor surrounding every other aspect of abortion. It sometimes seems as though the two extremes want to shout rather than consider solutions.

And so the debate will continue among those unwilling to explore any ‘solution’ not fashioned from their own ideology.

But the extent of the problem may well be diminished by science, by new reproductive technologies that sustain the viability of fetuses removed from women who do not wish to become mothers. Like heart transplants or intrauterine operations to correct birth defects, ectogenesis may taken for granted some day.

The most optimistic scenario is that a not-too-future generation will look back on abortion as a barbaric procedure, and learn the terms ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ from a history text.

More realistically, new reproductive technologies will just help a bad situation. But help should not dismissed lightly.

Interestingly, in the article I blogged about the other day, Germain Grisez anticipated just such a possibility (the article was written in 1970). He uses the thought-experiment of the “artificial uterus” to distinguish between cases where the fetus is removed (for the sake of saving the mother’s life, for instance), with its death being merely a forseeable side-effect, and cases where the fetus is killed precisely in order to remove the burden of caring for it:

If a person is killed because he is unwanted or because he is considered surplus, clearly the precise intention is to kill. The motive for the killing is to get rid of the one killed; getting the victim out of the way is not an intention other than the intent to kill him, but a formulation of the end for which killing is the chosen means.

This conclusion may become more evident if one considers what would be done in such cases of abortion if there existed an artificial uterus into which the publicly or privately unwanted baby might be transferred. Such a device might be used in cases of genuinely therapeutic abortion. But the unwanted baby would hardly be cared for in this manner. To do so would frustrate the whole point of aborting him—which is, of course, to get rid of him in order that he may not live to make his claim upon his parents and society.

The existence of artificial wombs would also force people who consider themselves pro-life to step up to the plate in caring for children whose parents may be unwilling or unable to care for them. It would also, hopefully, force our society as a whole to rethink the idea of abortion as a “solution” to poverty.