jrtom

In response to "driving past an empty cemetery" (courtesy of

vito_excalibur), I offer the following thoughts, which have been running around in my brain for a few years now.

(Prefatory note the first: this has not been a personal issue, in any of the obvious senses of the word, for me for some time. Don't overinterpret the fact that I'm talking about this issue. *wry smile* )

(Prefatory note the second: lots of good stuff in the original post and in the responses. I'm just going in a different direction here.)

I think it's a truism that there are no easy stances to take here. Deciding to raise a child is a huge thing. So is deciding to make sure that you won't be doing so, either on an individual basis (abortion) or as a matter of enforced policy (consistent birth control or sterilization).

However, the advantage in terms of simplicity of position clearly goes to the pro-life group: life begins at conception, and you should take no direct action to prevent its development. While one can joke about the trillions of sperm and billions of eggs that never get the chance to fulfill their potential, there's at least an obvious decision boundary for this stance. (Plus the obvious point that there are simply far more sperm than eggs, thus ensuring that several nines of them will get "wasted" (in the fine old traditional wording of Monty Python) regardless of what you do.)

Part of the problem for the pro-choice folks is that while on the face of it, their stance is "life begins at birth", the movement as a whole does not have a coherent response to the obvious question: "does it have to be birth after 9 months--and if not, where's the cutoff?"

Larry Niven (hard SF author, for those of you who don't recognize the name) has said that "Technology changes ethics"; this theme has informed several of his books and short stories. I might amend that statement slightly to "changes in technology enable changes in ethics", but that's mostly a quibble.

So what has this got to do with this issue?

Well, it used to be that children born prematurely died much more often. I'm sure there's still an effect, but I now have second-hand knowledge of children that were born four months premature, and we now have the technology to at least alleviate the problems that such children encounter--this sort of problem is not "routine", but it is dealt with on a regular basis. As we get better at medical technology, the probability of viability of a child X months along will continue to increase, and ultimately it's a reasonable guess that we'll be able to do this at any point back to conception.

So if we have, or are getting, this technology, we'll have a choice: if someone doesn't want to be pregnant any more, we will be able to take the zygote/blastocyst/fetus out, place it in what the SF author Bujold calls a uterine replicator, and let it mature there, with no further risk to the mother's health.

Once you can do this, it seems to me that the terms of the abortion debate are changed. Up to that point, one could counter objections to abortion with responses such as "I don't want to carry a child of incest/rape" or "it's my body, I get to make the decisions". But if there is a straightforward, safe, reliable procedure to remove the fetus at any stage past conception, then at that point, it seems to me that the remaining questions may look like this:

(a) who has the right to decide when/whether this will be done?
(b) if it is done, who retains decision-making power/custody?
(c) who pays for it?
(d) are there ever any circumstances under which abortion, per se, is permissible if this is possible?

Or to look at it another way: once the technology is there, the question of what is ethical may change, depending on the resources available--arguably, this becomes a question whose answer will depend more on economics than anything else, unless this procedure (and artificial gestation) are unexpectedly cheap.

And at that point the _real_ cans of worms get opened: for example, would women be forced to pay everything they had in order to get this procedure rather than an abortion?

I don't have any answers for this, obviously. And I don't claim that these thoughts are original. But I think it's worth thinking about these issues, and how the debate may be changed, before it happens.