I wonder how large these baby farms would get? I mean if every pregnancy can just be teleported out, I could conceivably get pregnant 6+ a year, have each one removed and just go on with my life. I am assuming that the state would pay for the 8 or so months of gestation for all the unwanted feti? Who pays to house all the incubators? And the huge staff to monitor them, and make sure each fetus gets correct nutrition? Will we genetically test each one for problems? How many am I allowed to have removed before I am put on some kind of blacklist?
Hey, simple solution. We allow sponsoring/adoption by corporations. The fetii-cum-children wouldn’t technically be property…but if they’re raised until age of majority with only the training/indoctrination to become future employees, what else are they gonna do?
Well, that or they could enlist, and be shock troops. But Exxon could use them for the same thing, anyway. Eh, at least they’re off the streets.
Like some others, I am pro-choice because I believe a person’s bodily autonomy trumps pretty much everything else. This device eliminates that problem and creates a new one. The new one is not related to abortion, so involves a different conversation, but for this conversation, I would then be fine with outlawing most abortions.
I also think we’d be a whole nation of morons if we thought that solved anything.
If the incubators are “obscenely expensive” then they don’t change the story. If they’re $10 more than an abortion, they’re a huge bargain - that’s far less than a birth costs and the mother doesn’t need the recuperation time either. The main drawback of early decanting is the loss of lactation, and if you decant into the container late enough (say, when labor starts) you probably lactate just fine. So it’s super nice for people who want babies. Well worth the cost.
As for abortion, I would think it was less important at the very least. The more important thing would be the population issue - society would probably change its mind about the implications of limiting reproduction. Or we’d end up with huge social impact problems that’d make all the chaos the OP wanted.
There are multiple reasons why I’m pro-choice. One is bodily rights - the government should never forcibly coerce a person into lending their body to another entity as a life-support system. Obviously, that is negated by this invention.
But there’s also the issue that I’m convinced an embryo is not even close to being a fully-fledged human being deserving legal personhood. Therefore, if it’s preferable to someone to kill an embryo rather than teleport it, why should I care? It’s arguable that at a certain point a fetus could be close enough to being a person that government intervention on its behalf is justified - I’d be willing to be persuaded on that.
BUT, there’s still the issue of euthanasia. Lots of late-term abortions are due to the discovery that the fetus has severe defects which would mean life outside the womb would be brief and uniformly painful. On a gut level, I feel like parents should be able to make the decision to terminate at a point when the suffering involved in death is much less.
I also have an emotional response that people should be able to choose abortion rather than adoption, because babies aren’t like old furniture you can Craigslist and forget about. We have deep-seated ties to our offspring, and knowing that your child is floating around out there somewhere with other parents isn’t something that can be hand-waved away with the platitude “Choose Life!” However, as I analyze the logic of this, I admit I can’t really justify why I have to make the choice to either raise my born children or hand them off to someone else, but somehow that dilemma is less fair for the parents of a 35-week fetus in an artificial uterus.