The argument that a woman MUST have the right to terminate all parental rights when the fetus is extracted to the uterine replicator, or else she would have the right to kill the fetus fails.
Right now men do not have that option. If a woman decides to give birth to a child, the man is legally obligated to provide support for that child, even if he wanted the child to be aborted, or even if he wanted the child to be born but wanted to sign away parental rights.
It would seem that uterine replicators would place the woman in the same place legally that a man is in. The baby is not in her body, but extracting it does not free her from her legal obligations to that baby, any more than the fact that when a man creates a child he isn’t pregnant with the child. The child is still his child, whether it is in his body or not.
A man does not have the right to decide to abort a baby. The current reasoning behind this law is that the man isn’t carrying the baby, the woman is. But what if the woman wasn’t required to carry the baby either?
So the scenario is, a man and a woman have sex, the woman finds out she’s pregnant, and the embryo/fetus is extracted and put in the uterine replicator. If it stays there and someone funds the maintence of the replicator, in 9 months the baby will be decanted.
Once the embryo is extracted, it seems to me that both parents should be in the exact same position legally. The only rationale for treating parents of differnt sexes differently is due to the biology of mammalian reproduction. Once the embryo is externally gestated the special interests of the mother no longer trump the intrests of the father OR the embryo.
Now, currently is is legally permissable to dispose of embryos. Since embryos can’t grow much beyond a few cells with our current technology this is deemed acceptable. The embryo will eventually die unless implanted in a woman, so unless someone volunteers there is no way we can mandate that the embryos be preserved. This of course is why some people think in vitro fertillization is wrong. But most people have no problem with creating embryos and destroying some.
But what happens when any embryo lying around in some freezer can be brought to term without requiring any woman’s body? We obviously can’t requisition women’s wombs for the good of a baby. But what if we don’t have to? Currently our abortion laws and ethics presume a conflict between the right of the baby’s mother to bodily autonomy, and the human rights of the unborn baby. At some point the rights of the mother trump the rights of the baby, at other points the rights of the baby trump the rights of the mother. But what if there were no conflict…if the rights of the baby had no impact on the bodily autonomy of the baby’s mother?
I don’t see how we could allow mothers to terminate the lives of unborn babies if their bodily autonomy did not depend on that termination. As for psychological, economic or social rights, well, our current laws certainly don’t allow fathers to kill babies for those reasons. If a mother simply doesn’t want the hassle and expense of raising a baby she can abort the baby. But a father cannot do that, he is legally obligated to raise the baby, even if his only interaction with the mother was a quick few minutes of depositing sperm into her. So even if a woman cannot be obligated to carry a baby to term in her own body, she can certainly be obligated to pay child support until that baby is 18 years old, just like the baby’s father.
It seems to me that uterine replicators remove every justification for abortion, except for euthanasia of babies who are not developing correctly. And in that case we currently allow the removal of life support from severely ill people who have no chance of getting better. If a baby is going to die anyway there’s no sense in keeping the uterine replicator running, any more than there is in keeping a comatose terminal patient on life support.
Conception and birth are taken as bright dividing lines by both pro- and anti- abortion people. But the reality is that they are not bright dividing lines. Uterine replicators would simply make the biological reality a little more obvious.