Strawmen, sure.
Yet people listed things that…
And that therefore…
But those very things still have a lot of relevance, even to people who can’t afford them. It’s not at all…
…and I don’t have to resort to…
I can just quote you.
The bottom line is that we have real world refutations of what you are suggesting, and you’re clearly just ignoring them.
Speaking as a woman who incubated a couple of babies, i would be DELIGHTED if there were other options. Pregnancy is awful. Happy to go into more details.
I’m good, thanks. My sister once offered to help with my empathy in this regard, using two strong friends and a watermelon.
Does everyone here believe that “I want children but I don’t want to be pregnant” would count as medical necessity for a public health care system or an insurance company to cover? I’m pretty sure that use case would be categorized as “elective” and therefore out of the patient’s own pocket.
Medical necessity is to preserve the life or health of the mother or fetus, and it would take a radical change of mindset to say that artificial gestation is medically preferable to natural gestation and parturition.
Public attitudes to such things do change over time. The FMLA didn’t get signed into law in the US until 1993. Before then, the work-life balance regarding the process of having children was not something considered vital. If you were going to have a kid, then you had to make sacrifices at work. That’s no longer the case.
Similarly, we have a similar attitude from a medical perspective. The dangers and difficulties of having a child are normal and while we have medical procedures to make it safer and more comfortable than it used to be, a natural birth is still the de facto standard way to do it. If artificial gestation became more viable, then that attitude might dramatically change as well. Especially if it can be shown to greatly improve the safety of the mother and child. Why wouldn’t it change?
“Would” or “should?” The American health care system is a toxic trash fire, so no, I don’t think access to artificial wombs would be covered.
But it absolutely should.
Do you think it shouldn’t? You seem to think it’s somehow unreasonable for a woman to want a kid without having the attendant health risks and physical trauma of carrying it inside her body, but maybe I’m reading more of a sneer into “I want children but I don’t want to be pregnant,” than you intended.
As a male, I can unequivocally say that I wanted children but I didn’t want to get pregnant. Why shouldn’t my wife be able to say the same thing?
I’m all in favor of technology that makes life less unfair.
Massachusetts does not run for-profit prisons. You may disagree with the way they are run, that’s a perfectly wise interpretation considering this policy/proposal. But these words mean something, and MA does not run any private prisons.
I am saying “would”, if this artificial gestation technology is introduced into the current real world. I wasn’t premising my discussion here on any greater discussion of fairness, or economic ethics, or any other contractual considerations.
We are, by and large, talking about the real world, right?
It’s possible to argue that medical insurance should cover it.
But it obviously is not a medical necessity. Having children itself is not a medical need. People may want to have children, but it is not something required for them to be able to stay alive. There’s a reason why it’s phrased as “want to have children,” not “need to have children.”
And most healthcare systems, including those outside the US, differentiate the two, and only cover medical necessities. Hence the argument that this would be something only available to the rich.
I didn’t even think of this aspect at all at first. I just though “my body, my choice”–meaning those who signed up for it before they died could voluntarily, but that no one (not even their next of kin) should be able to force them afterwards.
But I definitely can see the argument here. Using poor people’s bodies for the service of the rich hits on some very strong moral taboos. The rich paying poor people to become machines for them is rather morally fraught.
Sure, it’s possible to come up with a system where that doesn’t happen. But that system isn’t the system we have today. You’d need a system where people don’t get paid to be a brain dead surrogate, where next of kin can’t be paid to put the brain dead up as surrogates, and where the service is doled out to everyone.
Like it or not, things involving people’s bodies are morally different than other medical advances when it comes to the moral issues. An expensive drug doesn’t have the same moral implications as using someone’s body. There’s another person involved who needs to be able to freely consent to everything, and not feel any pressure to do it for their family.
Hence why I brought up the relatively recent adoption of the FMLA into law. Attitudes do change over time.
I guess I’m not clear on what you’re trying to discuss? Pointing out that the American health care system is shit isn’t really news to anyone. Neither is the idea that new technology is initially only available to the wealthy. I’m not sure how either observation really adds to or rebuts the suggestion that we should put more research into artificial wombs. Sure, we’re unlikely to get to the point where it entirely replaces natural childbirth, but the existence of tech like that would be an enormous boon to all sorts of women going through difficult pregnancies. Being able to put a premature infant into one to “cook” for another month or so alone would be huge, and the sort of thing that would be easily made available to people at almost every economic level under even a moderately functional health care system.
It could also potentially have massive implications on the abortion debate.
The massive demographic cliff the industrialized world is running head-long into is just the sort of thing that can force those changes, too. Federally subsidized access to exo-wombs would be a genuinely positive, non-Handmaideny way the government could encourage people to have more kids.
However, it does inch us a bit closer to Brave New World which makes me a bit nervous. (That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to it, but my unreasonable “ick” response gets triggered regardless.)
I’m not saying it’s impossible or that it should be opposed, only that it’s not the status quo.
This entire topic is based on the status quo. The headline is a legal proposal that transgresses the status quo of medical ethics. It is not about what anyone thinks the status quo should expand to.
Given the status quo, artificial gestation would not be available on-demand, only by demonstrated medical necessity. For anything other than that, it would be wholly at the patient’s expense, and therefore only available to the wealthy.
If they broaden eligibility, great. But I wasn’t thinking about post-capitalim here, just the current state of what’s typically paid by some third party payer, and what’s acceptable to be paid out of pocket.
You know, I’ve never actually ready Brave New World. I know it by reputation as “That dystopia where the government gives you drugs,” and as dystopias go, I think I could kinda get behind that one.
I did. It has been a while since I read it (as in, more than 20 years) but what stuck with me the most was how they completely removed the entire idea of families, and had all children born artificially and then raised by the state into various classes based on aptitude. Drugging people into a constant state of happiness was another theme of the book and a way to control the population. I’m pretty sure the film Equilibrium was inspired by this novel, though in that film the drug removes emotions rather than making someone happy. Oh, and the video game We Happy Few openly borrowed some of their themes from the book, particularly the idea that people are forced to be drugged all the time.
Specifically though, the idea of removing the idea of parents and family completely was what always lingered about that book and disturbed me.
You don’t really need gestational bottles to do that, though. Cultures and communities have done it for centuries, simply by removing a child from a mother at the earliest opportunity and raising it as a ward of the society or state. Forbid marriage and Bob’s no longer your uncle.
No, of course not. (Hence why I called my own uneasiness “unreasonable”.) The only reason it puts it in mind is because the artificial gestation was part of the story.
And that’s why insurance companies don’t cover any of the costs associated with pregnancy or childbirth. Those were choices that were made.