On 9/15/00, at 9:01 AM, hal@finney.org wrote:
>Biologically, this has not been an option in the past for the fetus.
>But as Barbara suggests, with improving technology this will eventually
>change. It will be possible to extract an unwanted fetus and raise it
>outside the mother's body.
:
>Could this be a compromise on the abortion issue acceptable to many
>parties?
With a modest effort, we could probably develop the technology for
transplanting a fetus from one womb to another. There are lots of
details to work out, but I don't think it's harder than other things
we do now, like in-utero surgery or reattaching severed body parts.
The biggest gotcha is that for now, and some time to come, destructive
extraction of a fetus (abortion) is less hazardous to the birth mother
than non-destructive extraction (transplantation, Caesarean birth,
many natural births).
And a pro-choice advocate could reasonably ask why a woman should be
compelled to expose herself to greater risk of injury or death.
OTOH, it's a plausible compromise. Specifics are important. Is this
a voluntary option, or the only legal alternative to childbirth? If
it's involuntary, could the compromise be that 1st trimester abortions
are okay, but if you want to end a pregnancy in the 2nd trimester, you
have to do it this way? Does it matter whether the pregnancy was entered
voluntarily or not? In line with the question of father's rights, is
this a reasonable solution to the case where mom wants an abortion but
dad wants the baby?
In any case, I think I'd like to see the technology developed. It could
be useful in non-abortion situations as well. For example, if the birth
mother has toxemia, it might be safer for both mother and child to move
the baby to a surrogate mother.
-- David Lubkin.
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