“Viability” is a technological definition, not a moral or philosophical one. It changes as medical technology improves. It’s mainly useful as a wedge issue, to provide women with an ever-shrinking window of opportunity while pretending to be based on some kind of moral principle. Eventually it will vanish entirely, given that work on artificial wombs is ongoing.
Which I personally would be fine with, assuming that the embryo or early-term fetus can be removed from the pregnant person’s own uterus to be rehomed in an artificial uterus with no more risk or invasiveness than a pregnancy termination.
A pregnant person’s right to terminate a pregnancy means the right to remove the developing embryo/fetus and thereby cease being pregnant. There’s no right to require that the removed embryo/fetus ceases to survive at all, if resources are available to enable its survival.
But I think it’s going to be a very long while before artificial uteruses can replace real ones for supporting fetal development beginning in early pregnancy.
Which is unlikely, since you’d probably have to rip out part or all of her uterus to do the transfer. But to the anti-abortion crowd that would be part of the attraction of requiring it. Punishment for her Sin.
Can a baby in any real sense “own their body” though? For that matter does ownership of the body really pertain to the right not for your body to be violated?
Minors can own things, but legally it’s usually subject to the approval or guidance of a parent or guardian. So under the ownership model, a child only owns itself to the extent that parents permit that ownership to be exercised.
Killing a child isn’t illegal because the child owns its body, it’s because we consider killing immoral regardless of whatever you may own. An infant in fact cannot live on its own, it depends on the care of others for at least a dozen or so years, but its state of dependency doesn’t allow it simply to be killed. The only applicable theory is personhood, not ownership or self-sufficiency. If it’s alive and outside the body, it’s a person. If it’s inside the body and alive, it’s an organ.
I think a better frame is that a fetus inside a woman’s body is not a person or even a separate being, it’s an organ in an adult’s body, and adults are allowed to decide if a problematic organ is causing a treatable medical condition (in this case pregnancy), and physicians are obligated to provide that treatment to resolve it (abortion) if it doesn’t physically endanger the patient in any other way, and they’re not being coerced.
There could be an argument that someone having a psychotic break shouldn’t be given an abortion for the asking, because it might be temporary insanity, and they might regret it later. But obviously that could get really thorny really quickly, as any such loophole can, so it should be regarded with a lot of skepticism and hesitation.
Yeah, the idea of technology to quasi-magically transfer a developing embryo/fetus from a natural to an artificial uterus, almost as easily and untraumatically as moving a chicken’s egg from a nest to an incubator, is still pretty much utopian sci-fi.
I suspect it will be easier to drop a fertilized egg into an artificial womb than to remove a placenta from it’s home and transplant it into something else. But they can do some very delicate surgery these days, so who knows, if an artificial womb is possible at all, maybe it will someday be done. If the technology is developed at all, it will presumably be developed for some very expensive animal.
In today’s world there are already many hoops to jump through for those seeking gender affirming surgeries – especially for trans individuals – and even more for those with Body Integrity Dysphoria (the feeling that one or more limbs must be removed that “shouldn’t be there”, or becoming blind or deaf). We obviously don’t have full bodily autonomy or else those who want a leg removed could walk into a clinic and have that done*. Even suicide is against the law in many (most?) jurisdicitons.
The argument that a woman has absolute right to determine what happens with her own body is therefore obviously false, because NO ONE currently enjoys that right. Even if there were no legal obstacles, the medical community has their own standards that they apply on a case-by-case basis to determine what level of care is appropriate or allowed. And for a lot of things (trans care or BID) the process takes years – much longer than a nine-month pregnancy – and only after lots of therapy.
So you’re right, there need to be safeguards in place to prevent people from doing things to themselves capriciously. I’d personally include abortion in that category, but I recognise that the world is complicated and society doesn’t have enough structures in place to support the mother and her child after the birth. The process for deciding on an abortion should be faster than for trans care, but not so fast that conditions like “temporary insanity” are overlooked.
The best I can come up with is to get the polticians out of the debate (except encourage them to build more support structures if they really care about lowering abortion rates) and leave it up to the medical community to decide what is appropriate and when.
* of course they wouldn’t be walking out again afterwards! 
“Hi! I’d like to get an abortion, uh, remove the placenta delicately without harming me and placing the fetus into an artificial womb. I was raped and don’t want to carry this baby, but, sure, I’m super happy to be forced to have a child of mine and my rapist out there in the world!”
“Sure, here’s your bill for $2m.”
Yeah, I’m curious what the people who favour the “artificial womb” scenario see happening once the baby is born. Who’s paying for this? Are we just dumping tens, if not hundreds of thousands of newborns into the foster system?
About 1 million abortions/year in the US, about 1/4 of women will be forced to have their offspring out in the world.
Yes, but I’m presuming a decent number of them are either medically necessary or early term enough that an artificial womb would be impractical. Although if it’s truly a day 1 embryo ready artificial womb, do we now have a moral imperative to grow and raise all viable embryos made during IVF? Because that’s millions more, and the moral calculus seems pretty much the same to me.
“i really want a baby, but i have cancer and also want to start chemo really soon. That will kill or severely damage any fetus i might be carrying.”
“I’ve already spent $200k getting this baby started, but I’ve developed life-threatening preclampsia. Please try to save the baby. I realize you might have to remove my whole womb to do this and also keep me alive.” (I have a friend who would have made this choice. She had an abortion. And later hired a surrogate to carry a baby for her.)
“I am a professional actor/athlete/dancer and want to have a baby, but don’t want to take a lot of time off from my job.”
I can think of lots of other possible use cases. And if it got affordable, i think it would be wildly popular. Being pregnant sucks.
I don’t think anyone is against artificial wombs in general. They would be a godsend for many women. We (or at least I) am specifically questioning the logic about abortion being removed as an option, and women instead being forced to transfer a fetus to an artificial womb
I haven’t advocate for that except possibly in very late stage abortions. Fwiw, very late stage abortions are almost always done due to health issues, not, “i don’t want the baby” issues, so there wouldn’t be a lot of conflicts involving forcing the mother to have the child. Also, most states allow a mother to abandon a newborn to the state. I assume that would extend to these cases.
But the majority of late term abortions are tragic.
To be totally clear, I think artificial wombs would be great, but I don’t think abortion laws or limits should be affected by them. People in this thread have said that the abortion calculus changes if they’re available, but I disagree.
I don’t think a fertilized egg has the same moral value as a fetus that’s got a brain that’s firing off complex signals. If we had perfectly viable artificial wombs and it was super easy to move a fetus over, I still think abortion would be morally acceptable up to a certain point in development.
Although I would suggest that if we had such fantastic artificial wombs we should probably just stop messing around with the old way of doing things entirely. Give everyone free birth control, morning after pills, vasectomies, whatever - sex can be for fun and bonding and artificial wombs can be for reproduction. Then we will have 0 abortions. Everyone wins!
If someone still wants to get pregnant, they should be allowed to, of course.
To be totally clear, I agree with this fully.
I think the moral calculus of the situations where I would think an abortion is appropriate or not would change. I don’t think the law should change.
(The procedures that doctors consider in line with their code of ethics and thus are willing to perform might change, though; that would be up to the doctors.)
This is a fair point for sure.
I agree. And i currently favor no legal limits on abortion only because i don’t want the medical team to have to worry about being prosecuted when they try to save the life of a pregnant patient. So artificial wombs would change the calculus for me, because you would often have an option other than abortion in those cases, and i think the moral action would be to do your best to remove the not-quite-ready fetus alive, and let it finish gestating in vitro. And I’d be okay if the law required that for late-term fetal-removals.
My counterargument to this would be that I don’t think a doctor abiding by the principles of medical ethics such as nonmaleficence would perform an abortion as opposed to removal and transplantation of the embryo in such a scenario anyways. I think I feel more comfortable leaving that decision up to codes of medical ethics than I do legally codifying it.
If we had these wombs and a bunch of late term abortions were being performed anyways I might reconsider that stance, but I just don’t see that happening.