IIRC, the essence of Roe v Wade was based on risks to the health of the mother. So long as an abortion is a lower risk to the mother than carrying to term, the mother couldn’t be involuntarily be made to take the higher risk to her own health. With the technology described in the OP, there is no such cost/benefit analysis for the female and her doctor to make. I would expect the parents to have an absolutely equal say in the decision.
It’s the post-birth questions which will complicate things. If either party can unilaterally decide to terminate – well, that’s one form of equality. If both parties have to agree to terminate, that would open a whole new level of questions to address.
For instance, if one want to terminate and one wants to keep it to term, could they bargain on who would later be responsible for the future expenses of raising a child? That’s an option very limited right now, but might be more reasonable with the OP scenario.
Just because if an earthquake hits the hospital and then the janitor backs the forklift into the backup generator it means people will die, that we should then decide we’re OK with the hospital administrator euthanizing people whenever he gets a whim.
Your premature baby is being cared for at the neonatal ICU in 2016. You come by tomorrow morning to visit, and the doctor tells you he got drunk decided to unplug the machines in the ICE because it was costing a lot of money. What happens to that doctor? Nothing I can do, he’s the guy in control of the machines, and if I didn’t want to give him the power to let my child die on a whim I should have chosen another doctor?
Or, does the doctor in fact have a legal and ethical obligation to provide the standard of care he owes to his patients? And if, here in the real world of 2016, doctors can’t just kill patients or withdraw lifesaving treatments on a whim, why should we reasonably expect things to be different in 10 years? Sure, we could live in a dystopian hellscape where we’re just serfs with no rights and the rich and powerful hold literal power of life and death over us, and kill us for sport. But I thought we were talking about what would be a reasonable ethical standard for the care that babies gestating in artificial wombs would be owed. Yeah, sometimes in China party bosses kidnap people and carve them up for organ transplants. Is that what we want to allow here, or in the future?
If the ethical point of abortion is to allow people who didn’t want to become parents to not become parents, then the overwhelming majority of those cases are covered simply because you can’t get drunk and accidentally get a uterine replicator pregnant. Now we only have to deal with the cases of people who go in for an invasive and life-changing procedure on purpose, and then suddenly change their minds months later.
My point is, we don’t let people change their minds on a whim once their kids are born. Already no doctor will agree to perform a late-term abortion that isn’t medically necessary. So what’s the competing social interest in allowing the euthanasia of a fetus gestating in an artificial womb? Some things you don’t get to back out of, just because you wish you could. Some treatments doctors don’t get to impose or withhold, just because they wish they could.
As a society we give 6 months to decide you don’t want to be a parent. I see no reason there won’t be a similar timeline with an artificial womb and then after that term the kid goes up for adoption. I have no doubt there will be people upset at that killing of children who will step up to adopt them by the truckload.
There’s already a very long waiting list if you want to adopt a healthy newborn baby. The kids who can’t get adopted are older kids.
Seriously you think there’s going to be a huge number of people who accidentally get a uterine replicator pregnant? The number of cases where people intentionally decided to create a baby in a lab, and then changed their mind a few months later is going to be really small. And there are lots of people who want to adopt newborn babies. So finding homes for the dozens of such babies who are created every year shouldn’t be a huge problem.
And requiring people who want to artificially create babies in a lab to post a bond that only gets refunded when they either agree to care for the baby or an adoptive parent is found for the baby gets society completely off the hook, if all you really care about is paying taxes to take care of some irresponsible person’s kids.
Ever heard of a ‘paperclip catastrophe’? Program the exo-wombs to want to have babies, and they’ll convert the solid mass of the Solar System into wriggling pink goo.
There is no balancing of health of the mother vs health of the fetus. Dr’s and pregnant women are not required to use any information about health risks. A perfectly healthy fetus can be aborted for any or no reason by a perfectly healthy mother.
Neither biological parent has a right to end the life of the fetus. The death of the fetus is a byproduct, not a goal.
Since neither has that right now, there’s no reason to consider that question. Once there is a viable human life then it has its own rights and can’t be terminated on a whim. Look at the Terri Schiavo case, she was kept alive for YEARS with Herculean efforts. The axlotl tank future of humanity would require it to be lower risk and lower cost than the current, relatively cheap, method of using a human female for incubating offspring. Therefore it’s likely the cost of keeping an “unwanted” baby is pretty low. Some protein slurry and a few KWh per day. If there’s reason to believe this fetus would develop normally and then be able to be decanted and be adopted then just because the genetic donors get killed in a car crash there’s no reason to terminate it. The state support of the fetus will end soon enough and someone will probably adopt it, and if not then it grows up as a foster kid. Not ideal, but the perfect shouldn’t be allowed to be the enemy of the good enough. Tons of kids end up screwed up by their biological parents as well. Somehow most of them go on to live productive lives.
This is a ridiculous way of describing the situation. Regardless of the goals, under today’s rules the mother certainly and unquestionably has the right to terminate the life of the fetus, through the first trimester at least.
Your opinion of it’s “ridiculous” nature notwithstanding, that is the current settled law of the land and has been since 1973 at least. A woman has a legal right(using the definition of a right as the law defines it) to keep the government out of her medical decisions up until the point where the government has to intervene to protect the rights of another(currently pre-viability of the fetus). The fact that this right is a de facto equivalent of the ability to end the life of the fetus is circumstantial, not primary. Once her autonomy over her body ceases to be part and parcel with the survival of the fetus(such as external gestation, the topic of the OP, or very early premature birth interventions which can make a preemie born before the end of the abortion cut-off viable) that’s where her ability to affect the life of the fetus ends. If the woman had a RIGHT to end the life of the fetus then it wouldn’t matter if the fetus was in her womb or born an extreme preemie(before the abortion cut-off) and in an incubator across the room, she could terminate it. But once it’s not dependent on her body, she has no more right to terminate it than she does any other human life on the planet and she could be charged with murder if she unplugged the incubator.
This is also why the men’s rights activists get absolutely no traction in the courts by the way. The woman has no right to terminate the fetus, she only has a right to keep her personal medical decisions private. He also has the right to keep his personal medical decisions private. Therefore there is no inequity between the woman and the man. Neither of them has the right to terminate the fetus.
It sounds like your issue with the law is similar to my own, that it’s some sort of parallel universe where things seem like they’re the same, until you really look closely at them and then suddenly the differences become glaring. I agree it flies in the face of common sense, but that’s still how the law works.
I think the fetus should remain property until a certain pre-determined point. Before that, it belongs to those who sired it, in this case the parents. I do think that if we’re taking the premise on its face, the mother should not have more rights than the father, since it really isn’t about her body in this case. But I leave myself open to be convinced otherwise