I was going to answer the OP’s question with “Cordelia Vorkosigan” 
The entire argument changes here. Current real-world abortions tend to be for three things. Two of them can be relatively late term: health of the mother (which wouldn’t apply here unless this is one of those sci-fi-telekenetic parasite fetuses) and health of the fetus. Today, “health of the fetus” and “health of the mother” are often not disconnected, but in the vat scenario, they are. So I can see “either parent,” “both parents,” or “nobody” all as valid answers there, possibly differing based on precisely what was wrong with the fetus. (Add “anybody/everybody” if it is a telekinetic parasite fetus.)
But the vast majority of abortions are circumstance-based: the pregnancy was unexpected, unwanted, and causes non-health burdens on the parent(s) and the potential child. These cases are going to be vanishingly rare in the vat case, because deliberate actions with the intent of producing a fetus had to be taken to get into the vat in the first place. It’s not going to go away entirely – nine months is long enough for dramatic changes in parental circumstances – but it would be a tiny fraction of the current numbers. I expect public opinion would sway to “nobody” in this case, since most of the traditional arguments don’t apply, and it’s going to be almost vanishingly rare in any case.
That may be the history of abortion law in some countries. In others the argument that the fetus is just a lump of cells with no rights or need for protection is a bigger part of the equation. Norway for instance has complete free-choice up to the twelfth week, and it’s entirely possible that would continue. I’d definitely support it.
Not sure what you mean with the bolded part. AIUI, right now the law already does *not *honor/recognize “life begins at conception,” so it should be no surprise that they’d not see a problem with destroying frozen embryos either.
I think a relevant question would be about how babies in incubators are regarded legally/ethically. Is this akin to a “patient has been in coma for decades and we should pull the plug on the ventilator” ethics situation? Has there ever been a parent who legally “pulled the plug” on a premature baby in an incubator?
No, it’s generally not. At most, with additional medical attention beyond the incubator, it’s like a patient believed to be temporarily on a ventilator while lung function improves. Or at worst, on a ventilator while lung function is assessed.
Again, with the additional information that it’s not just a baby in an incubator, it’s babies that are not likely to survive long even with a lot of medical intervention, this does happen. This cite is specifically about parents fighting such a decision when doctors recommend them, but it’s not like “doctors recommend to stop treatment and parents agree” is as newsworthy: Withdrawing treatment from premature babies – when doctors and parents disagree
The person with control of the power switch. For instance, if the parents don’t pay their bills then the power to that embryo’s machine gets switched off. If the company running the embryo machines goes broke then they can’t afford to power the machines, etc.
Why? Seriously?
It’s not like a case where a teenage girl is fooling around and accidentally ends up pregnant. OK, I can see the case for allow the parent to turn off the machine in all cases of accidental artificial pregnancy. Oops, I slipped on banana peel, accidentally bumped into the switch which scraped off a tiny fragment of skin which flew over into the cloning vat which someone foolishly left open, and the skin cells are automatically processed. Yeah, that person can stop the process.
Otherwise, you don’t get to walk away any more than parents of a premature baby in the neonatal ICU get to walk away. Or rather, withdrawing medical treatment for a fetus in a replicator is only ethical under the same circumstances it would be ethical to withdraw medical treatment for a baby in the ICU. Don’t want to be responsible for a baby? Then don’t go through the expensive and laborious process of artificially creating one!
I’m not talking about frozen blastocysts here, or life begins at conception. Obviously an undifferentiated embryo isn’t a baby. But you’re not allowed to drown your kid in the bathtub just because you don’t feel like being a parent anymore. Yes, you’re allowed to terminate your parental rights and responsibilities–sometimes. Like, if somebody else is willing to volunteer to take over for you. If not, even if you refuse to take care of your kid you’re still the legal parent and we can legally force you to pay to take care of your goddam brat.
Again, don’t like it? Then don’t artificially gestate a baby in a goddam vat in the first place, and problem solved. The time to change your mind was yesterday.
So if you’re hit by a car and unconscious and they bring you in, and they can’t find enough money in your pockets to cover the bills, they just dump you back on the street?
Medical providers have legal and ethical obligations to provide lifesaving care even if the patient can’t pay. You’re not allowed to toss injured babies into dumpsters just because the parents can’t come up with money for the medical bills.
And the obvious solution to the deadbeat parent problem is to require cash up front before you agree to artificially create human life in a lab. And all Frankensteinian artificial human gestation facilities should be required to carry insurance enough to cover the costs of gestating the babies if they suddenly go bankrupt.
We already have workable ethical guidelines in place for assisted reproductive technology, and uterine replicators or cloning or genetic engineering or whatever don’t change those guidelines. These issues sometimes require a small bit of thought, but we don’t need anything new. No, cloned babies can’t be enslaved. No, you can’t genetically alter a baby into a circus freak. No, you can’t kill a baby just because the parents didn’t pay their bill on Tuesday.
Of course. Circumstances change all of the time and just because you wanted a child yesterday doesn’t mean that you want one tomorrow. Let’s say a couple who created the kid got divorced and neither wants to raise it as a single child and neither wants to spend the money to add another unwanted life into the world. Or what if the parents decide that don’t want to commit to taking care of a disabled child for the rest of their life? Once the child can survive without pricey intervention (probably what would be called born) then it can be given up for adoption.
I don’t see why we need to require that unwanted children are brought into this world. It is hard on the children, hard on the parents and hard on society. If society wants to bear the burden then it can bear the costs.
We don’t need to require that unwanted children be brought into the world. What we can do is require the people who artificially create babies in a lab to take care of their goddam kids.
Again, parents don’t get to toss their baby in a dumpster if they change their mind about being parents on the way home from the hospital. Some decisions can’t be undone on a whim.
If you don’t want to risk taking care of a disabled child, don’t have a child. If you might change your mind about wanting to be a parent, don’t be a parent.
The ethical dilemmas of abortion disappear when we’re talking about babies growing in an artificial womb. That can’t happen by accident. And so, before we allow the doctors to start growing babies in a lab, we can force the doctors and potential parents to jump through some goddam hoops first. Like, asking them “Are you really really sure? Cause if you’re not willing to sign your name on the line which is dotted that you’re really really sure you want this goddam baby and are pledging to care for this baby for the rest of its life, then fuck you. No baby grown in a vat for you.”
And if the docs aren’t willing to promise to behave themselves too, then we don’t give them permission to run baby growing factories. I can’t hang up a shingle advertising my baby growin’ vats because I’m not a doctor and I don’t have a license to practice medicine. And even if I was a doctor, I don’t get to offer any procedure I like any way I like, I have to follow medical ethics and law. So a requirement that no babies created in a lab unless everyone has enough insurance to cover the care of that baby seems pretty goddam reasonable. Don’t like it? Then you don’t get permission to grow babies in a lab. And now society doesn’t have to foot the bill to care for unwanted babies grown in a lab, because such a thing can’t happen by accident, and we don’t allow it to happen on purpose without some legally and financially binding guarantee from the parents who are commissioning the creation of the baby.
You know I think that philosophies like that are part of the problem with society. One of my good friends has a brother who’s a real shitbag and the last time they took his kids away it was going to be permanent. So the state gave the kids to my buddy who went from two kids to 6 overnight and him and his wife spent the last year caring for those children. They realized they couldn’t deal with 6 and gave the youngest two back to the system/up for adoption.
First off the four kids are very screwed up because of the drugs and neglect they got from their parents and I think it’s a shame that we don’t let people, who don’t want children, screw them up before we take them away rather then letting them surrender once they realize it’s not for them. Secondly I’m proud of my buddy for trying to raise those kids but people take on responsibility all of the time that they later decide is too much and I think know it’s a good thing that he was able to give the youngest two up for adoption so that he can raise all 4 of his kids well rather then be mediocre or worse to the 6.
There is no reason to let people not tap out when they can’t handle something. Currently abortion/adoptions are the methods of choice and I see no reason for that to change just because the baby is in a tank.
Absolute guarantees don’t exist, since life is fundamentally unpredictable. For example, a couple might conceive a vat-baby under the best possible circumstances, and then get in an accident a week later that kills one of them and leaves the other one so severely disabled that he or she is physically unable to care for a child. No one’s fault, no failure of responsibility, just life as it actually exists.
And if we required people to be absolutely certain that they wouldn’t change their minds about being parents, no one would become a parent, ever.
Of course shit happens to people. They die, they become disabled, they end up in jail or on drugs. And then their kids have to be dealt with. No guarantees in life.
I’m just saying, that it doesn’t make a difference whether the kid has been decanted from the birthing pod or not. If tree falls over our house tomorrow and I’m killed and our house destroyed and my wife permanently disabled, she wouldn’t be legally allowed to kill our children just because she doesn’t want to be a parent anymore.
We currently have methods for providing for children whose parents are unwilling or unable to care for them. Adoption certainly is one such method. If the gestating baby can be adopted before it’s born, then that’s certainly fine with me. But if nobody steps up to assume care of the baby, that doesn’t mean that we should kill it. We already have a system in place where if a parent doesn’t want to care for a baby, so sad. We can’t force you to physically care for the child, but we certainly can require you to pay child support for the next 18 years. If you’re paying child support and then become disabled, well, then 50% of nothing is nothing. Kid goes on welfare.
The point is, this happens today. If we really have a serious problem with people commissioning vat grown babies on a whim, and then changing their minds a few days later, then as I said we have a simple solution, just require a small contribution from everyone using this assisted fertility method to cover the cases where the baby ends up an orphan before it’s born, or its parents turn out to be shitheels. And we can also do, you know, a little bit of pre-screening? And people who are obvious unfit parents, maybe don’t help them artificially create human life in a lab?
The reason we don’t stop obvious shitheels from creating human life the natural way is because it would require totalitarian measures. But now we’re talking assisted fertility. You go out and get drunk and create a baby one night by accident, not much we can do about that. Nobody goes out and gets drunk and accidentally starts a baby growing in a vat. Since you’re already paying quite a bit for the procedure, we just require you to chip in a little bit more on top of that to cover normal unforeseen circumstances. And for the abnormal unforeseen unforeseen circumstances we have the existing panoply of social services we already have for children whose parents are unable/unwilling to care for them.
I would WAG that the fetus would have a person willing to ‘sponsor’ them in the case the OP mentions.
In another one of Bujold’s Vorkosigen novels, A Civil Campaign, a man creates dozens of baby daughters for complicated economic reasons, using his sperm and egg cells donated for other purposes by women who had no idea he was going to do this. He’s stopped by being required to provide each of them large dowries.
What assisted fertility? In the SciFi scenarios it’s usually treated as the usual way; it’s not something reserved for those who can’t make a baby the old-fashioned way. Anybody making a baby the old fashioned way in Beta Colony would be sent to reeducation day before yesterday; they’d invent time travel just so they’d be able to start reeducating them sooner.
If something like that became the usual way, places with UHC or any standard insurance packages would be quite likely to cover it. Again using the Beta example, people need to get a “child license”, but once that’s obtained there is no out of pocket costs mentioned.
And what if there’s an extended power outage for other reasons? Diggers go through power cables regularly. Blackouts happen. Human error happens, and there are many points along the chain. An external womb is under the control of whoever controls that womb, and that person is whoever controls the power etc to that womb.
Should external wombs become a reality then I predict that the value of a foetus will be significantly diminished as ‘you can just grow another one’.
Well for crying out loud, if we’re paying for everybody’s uterine replicator, then in this post-scarcity world why can’t we provide a basic income for the kids?
If the point is that parents should have the right to decide they don’t want to be parents, then they should have the same ability to stop being parents as people who’s baby is already decanted. That the baby is or isn’t decanted is irrelevant. You don’t the sole right to decide to kill a baby just because it’s in an artificial womb.
Again, the current politics of abortion are irrelevant in such a society. You can’t create a baby by accident. You have to have some level of economic resources before you can create this baby, whether you’re paying cash or the government foots the bill. It sure seems to me that if the government pays the bills for your uterine replicator that we shouldn’t do that unless we’re cool with paying the bills for the rest of the kid’s childhood if you drop dead tomorrow. Which, in today’s world, we are. We’re cool with some system of paying to take care of kids whose parents are dead or in jail or missing. Some of those kids get adopted, some are in foster care, some stay with relatives, and so on.
But we don’t allow parents today to kill their kids if they’re tired of taking care of them, even though taking care of those kids places a burden on society. No murdering kids, that’s our motto.
Abortion is different, because for various reasons it’s impractical, invasive, inhumane, unworkable, and totalitarian to try to criminalize abortion. But in a world where uterine replicators were routine, those reasons wouldn’t exist. The problem that there might sometimes be undecanted babies whose parent’s don’t feel like taking care of them anymore is just a small subset of all the other kids whose parent’s don’t feel like taking care of them. If we’re a rich society, we can all chip in a little to support kids. If we’re a poor society such that taking care of these kids is a horrible burden, then I guess we let them die. But the “rights” of the parents have nothing to do with it.
But you’re assuming that, as a culture, people are going to agree that an embryo or fetus in an artificial womb is a “kid” in the same sense that we now agree that a newborn infant is a “kid,” and I’m not sure that’s what would happen. (We don’t currently agree, as a society, that this is the case even in situations that don’t involve deliberate abortion; for example, there might be a few people who hold funerals after they have a miscarriage, but it isn’t by any means expected, even for late-term miscarriages.) As Quartz points out, it could quite easily go the other way, with people valuing fetuses less because it’s less trouble to keep them alive.