Oh, I see. Yeah, if she waited that long, she’s wrong.
I also think that late-term abortions for anything other than health reasons are wrong as well.
No, the woman wanted the cat spayed. If she’d been wanting the cat euthanized, they would have had her sign the cat over to the clinic and let her deliver the kittens in due time. Then they would have spayed her and adopted her out after she weaned the babies. Besides, she specifically mentioned that they never told the owner they didn’t kill the kittens.
It’s a whole other thread, but I don’t see the problem with the situation. Hell, when I adopted a cat who turned out to be 5 or 6 weeks pregnant (gestation in the cat is roughly 9 weeks), we went on and spayed her anyway. I wasn’t prepared to keep multiple cats, and trying to find homes for those five kittens would have meant that five other kittens wouldn’t get adopted. Five kittens never being born versus five kittens being euthanized at the shelter–I’d have to go with the poor little things never being born. Both situations suck, but one sucks marginally less.
As for the OP, I think there’s a lower limit on how far they’d be able to push it, and I think that lower limit would be later than most pregnancies are terminated. So I don’t know that it would eliminate very many abortions at all. Also, I think it would be prohibitively expensive for either the state or for individuals. You’d be talking about months in, essentially, the NICU, and that’s a hellacious amount of money per baby.
I’m pro-choice and I’m not sure I’m okay with that compromise. Why should the state encourage (by paying for the medical care) people to have children they don’t want?
Moderator’s Note: OK, that was weird.
The duplicate threads have been taken care of.
My opinion:
Suppose an eight-month pregnant woman suddenly begins to suffer from a medical condition which requires the termination of her pregnancy. And assume the condition does not prevent a safe c-section. Will the fetus be aborted? Of course not, preemie babies are safely delivered routinely. We have the technology to keep one-month preemies alive.
If the woman wants to give the newborn up for adoption, it’s not hard to do. While adoption for older children may be a difficult, there are many childless couples waiting in line to adopt an infant.
So what happens if we invent artificial womb technology that can sustain a fetus at all stages of development? There are childless couples who would use this technology for their own children. Thus an infrastructure will be built once this technology has been created.
And then the whole abortion issue will rear its ugly head. A person should have control of their own body–a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy, for any reason whatsoever.
But this right is not a right to destroy a fetus. True, given today’s technology, terminating a pregnancy will destroy a fetus in most stages of development. This is a necessity of technology, not a human right.
I think very few pro-choicers advocate a “right to destroy a fetus”, instead they weigh the rights of woman greater than the rights of a fetus. Once an artificial womb technology has been developed and a woman can safely and easily end a pregnancy without harming the fetus, there will be little political support for a women’s right to destroy fetuses movement.
Who will pay for the artifical wombs for fetus from terminated pregnancies? I expect some combination of tax money and adoption fees. We already have the basic regulatory and financial framework from infant adoptions.
Finally, my answer to the OP is yes the technology to safely sustain a fetus to term outside a woman’s body will end the need for abortions that destroy unwanted fetuses. And I believe there is nothing in principle scientifically that would prevent the development of such technology (although there may be social and political impediments).
I doubt it will ever be possible, and if it ever is, it will never be cost effective.
Pleonast, there are a bunch of couples waiting in line for healthy white babies. All the other kids have a slim chance of being adopted. There’s no reason to flood the system with even more unwanted children.
I am quite sure it will be possible, since I cannot think of any way that it would be fundamentally impossible, and technology allways advances.
It may even be economically viable, genetic engineering that has produced pigs with human hearts exists. Maybe a pig with human uterus could be implanted with an unwanted fetus for duration of term. The difficulties are great, but not too far into science fiction teritory. Whether people would want to create this technology, and the moral ramifications of it are quite another question.
Maybe in the future we will all have ‘spare part’ clones, kept unconcious as a supply for healthy replacement tissue. Such could also be used to carry a child that would otherwise be inconvinient.
Brave new world ???
I doubt it will ever be possible, and if it ever is, it will never be cost effective.
That is a very strong statement, considering how quickly technology changes. Do you have reason in particular to think an artifical womb is impossible? I would not be willing to put a time frame on how long it would take us to develop such technology, but I can’t think of any reason it’s not possible. There’s nothing magic about how a uterus works after all (which is not to say we have complete knowledge either).
And for cost effective: who’s to say how much it will cost? If the cost is less than the what a woman could earn during the weeks or months she cannot work due to a pregnancy, then it is cost effective in economic terms. And I’m sure there are women who’d like to be a biological mother without the discomfort and inconvenience of a pregnancy. And how much do some couples currently pay for inferitility treatments? Is that cost effective?
there are a bunch of couples waiting in line for healthy white babies. All the other kids have a slim chance of being adopted. There’s no reason to flood the system with even more unwanted children.
A quick google search a found 8 to 14% of non-related adoptions are interracial or international. (They seem to be lumped together; I think because many international adoptions are also interracial.) Until recently many adoption agencies actively discourages interracial adoptions. There may still be some discouragement for these.
But that doesn’t mean this apparently low rate will continue into the future. And even if it did, is this really a good enough reason to allow the destruction of some fetuses? Yes, the state may have to pay for artificial wombs and it may be costly. How much is a potential human life worth? (Considering the long-term negative growth rates that some countries are experiencing, they may be quite happy to subsidize artificial wombs.)
Okay, maybe I’m being too pessimistic. A fetus is dependent on it’s placenta for food and oxygen. That supply would have to be completely cut off for several minutes during the transfer to the artificial womb. During this time death, or brain damage could occur. That’s the main problem that I see. Now it is possible that this will be overcome some time soon, but it will be risky for a number of years, and I don’t see the state agreeing to pay for a procedure with a high failure rate.
As for cost effectiveness, we know that it won’t be cheap. Someone is going to have to pay to do the research to determine the amount of hormones that each embryo needs at each stage. Someone will have to pay to make sure that the embryos get those hormones and antibodies. Someone will have to pay doctors to monitor each fetus’ development. I don’t think we need to take the potential income of a pregnant woman into account, because the majority of woman who would agree to this procedure are those who would have aborted their pregnancy.
A lot of people opt for transracial adoptions because of the lack of children that could pass as “their own”. If we create a steady supply of white babies for adoption, how many people will adopt the black, hispanic and asian kids that are all ready around? I’m willing to bet that this procedure would mean more kids in foster care, not less (all the minority and disabled children grown in a lab will be there, along with all the ones grown “in vivo”).
How much is a human life worth? I don’t know, that’s more of a philosophy question that we’ll never get an answer to.
Out of curiosity, how are we planning to get the fetus out without injuring it or the woman? After all, a fetus in early pregnancy is pretty darn small, not to mention being somewhat attached to the uterus. I don’t think it would be possible to go in vaginally and pluck it out without damaging it or causing uterine trauma. Going in abdominally and cutting it out would be so invasive that nobody would voluntarily do that, and we can’t very well force people to have surgery against their will, now can we?
Are we talking about inducing labor and then scooping the fetus up and popping it into the incubator? If so, wouldn’t women have to wait a certain amount of time before induction, to let the fetus get big enough to find quickly? What if a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant long enough for the fetus to get that big? Would we force her to be pregnant against her will, or would she still get to have an abortion?
Good points about the fetus removal. I’d assume that the procedure would need to be an option for women in their first trimester if it is being used as a replacement for abortion. I don’t think that people who didn’t want to be pregnant would wait until they were six or seven months into it to get the transfer.
We know it wouldn’t be cheap in the near future. I’m thinking in terms of two or three hundred years from now. This type of technology won’t be developed by a narrowly focused research program. Instead I expect it will be the result of a sudden realization that several other technologies could be put together to create an artificial womb for a reasonable development cost.
And the initial market will be to women who cannot or choose not to have their own baby in their own uterus. The saving of fetuses from terminated pregnancies will become an issue only after the artificial wombs are already routinely used. Abortion will then become a major issue again, since the technological requirement that a fetus be destroyed in order to end a pregnancy will be gone.
CrazyCatLady, those are definite technical difficulties, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome in pricinple. Surgery may not always be as invasive as it is now. Perhaps the placenta could be extracted without damage to it or the fetus or the woman.
That far in the future, and at that level of medical technology, I’d hope that unwanted pregnancy would already be largely a thing of the past due to advances in the safety, effectiveness, and availability of contraceptives.
My wife is considered a ‘miracle baby’, having survived been born at 24 weeks. Much earlier than that and I doubt there is any chance of survival. Of course, her mother attempted a late term abortion by using as much alcohol and narcotics as she could find, which hasn’t made life the easiest road int he world.
[QUOTE=PleonastPerhaps the placenta could be extracted without damage to it or the fetus or the woman.[/QUOTE]
Well, there are three ways to get a placenta out: push it out (induce labor), suck it out, or scrape it out. Sucking or scraping the placenta out, well that just begging for fetal injury.
Just to continue the adoption vs. abortion debate. There are currently a LOT of families on the adoption waiting lists - and many of them do want healthy white infants. However, if there were no abortions and every aborted fetus became an adoptable baby (which wouldn’t happen, a certain percentage of parents who consider aborting never consider adopting and parent their children) the imbalance would shift the other direction in (depending on whoses numbers you use regarding the number of adoptions, number of abortions etc.) two to five years. Some parents would also continue to adopt international because domestic adoptions are perceived by them as “risky.” Then you start having more babies than adoptive families and you’ll have to find something to do with them.
Also, the more healthy white babies brought to term, the less chance that the kids who are adoptable now but are less than completely healthy or not white will get adopted. A lot of adoptive parents currently would “perfer” a healthy white child, but are “willing to consider” a child who was born low birthweight, who was exposed to alcohol during pregnancy, who has a cleft lip, or who is not white. More healthy white kids means that these kids the state needs to raise start out with strikes against them.