I am not against science, though my detractors would certainly hope you
believe that about me. I believe in medicine, vaccinations, surgical
intervention. I even believe in a woman’s right to choose. But I’m not going
to let researchers move forward with whatever technologies they dream up
without any consideration of the ethical ramifications. A few years ago, a
new startup was formed in the valley with one goal. They wanted to create an
artificial womb system capable of not only supporting a transplanted fetus,
but of fostering life from the very beginning. This would remove the need
for a mother and a father. There are some great things about this. Same-sex
couples would be able to have their own children, which I’m also not
against—I’m not a conservative nutjob who doesn’t believe in the future. I’m
an ethicist who focuses on precaution, and isn’t interested in developing
everything scientifically possible in the name of supposed progress. It
seemed pretty simple to me at first. God, evolution; whatever you wanna call
it, decided that we would produce offspring a certain way. A
biological male and female come together to conceive the child, and then
that child gestates in an organic womb, inside of a human being, who is
charged with protecting this new life. I’m all right with surrogate
pregnancies. I’m even fine with the concept of an artificial womb. But I can
also see how dangerous the technology is, and how many problems it can cause
down the road. I have been fighting hard to prevent it from becoming legal,
and letting Delphinus Obstetric Advancements win, but a friend recently
pointed out an undeniable implication. Even though I am pro-choice, I don’t
want anyone to have an abortion. Before focusing on this issue, I regularly
went out and informed women about their options. Abortion is not the only
way, and we should be working on ways to make it unnecessary. The artificial
womb seems to accomplish that.
The problem with abortion is that it’s the destruction of life. However you
define when a developing...entity transforms from a group of cells to an
actual person is irrelevant. Abortion means death, that’s what it is. If a
pregnant person does not want to have their child, that child can be
transplanted from the carrier, to an artificial gestation pod. It can then
develop in there, and be born in the lab. Of course, this comes with its own
ethical problems. What happens to the baby when it’s finally born? Who takes
care of it, raises it, teaches it? Who is responsible for finding that
person, or those people? The lab? The egg provider? The state? More to the
point, who has the right to make such decisions? Furthermore, this
complicates the matter of the egg provider’s rights in the first place.
Being unable, or unwilling, to raise a child, or even unwilling to birth a
child, are not the only reasons to have an abortion. If a state can
supersede one’s choice by simply saying “fine, if you don’t want it, we’ll
take it, and we’ll do it right now,” then is that really fair to the
original carrier? They weren’t necessarily choosing to simply have nothing
to do with their offspring. They chose to have an abortion, and an
artificial womb is not inherently synonymous with that choice. Ethics is a
complicated subject, and I don’t have an answer to any of these questions.
But it’s causing me to question my convictions, and stop thinking that I can
understand the issues clearly. All I know is that we can’t let the
government, or the corporations, take our rights. We must retain our
humanity, or all the technology imaginable can’t save us.
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