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Who thinks we're progressing still?
Smajdor uses provocative ideas to raise difficult questions. It works: she has made me think about how messed up our notions of what “normal” childbirth, pregnancy and motherhood are.
If perfect ectogenesis could ever exist, there is a long list of women who would want to use it: women with epilepsy, bipolar disorder or cancer, for whom pregnancy would mean risking either their own or their foetuses’ lives by stopping or starting medication; women who have had their wombs removed for medical reasons. Ectogenesis will also help women in circumstances much less likely to attract public sympathy: social surrogacy clients and older women, whose male equivalents have babies without a thought. You could conceive an embryo while you’re young and grow it in a bag after you retire.
But perhaps the people most likely to be emancipated by this technology are those not born female: single men, gay men and trans women desperate for their own biological children. I ask Smajdor about the benefits of ectogenesis for them.
“I don’t support anyone’s right to have a child. I support people’s right not to have their body interfered with.” Then she leaves the world of philosophical logic for a moment. “Assuming we could get perfect ectogenesis, it seems like a thing we should do, in a fully just society. The problem is that our societies are not fully just. In a society that believes natural reproduction is the most amazing part of a woman’s life, ectogenesis is going to be very problematic, and more likely to be used in ways that are detrimental to women.”
“What kind of ways?”
“When we talk about rescuing very premature babies, there’s a risk of a desire to rescue babies because their mother is not fit to carry the foetus,” Smajdor says. Across the world, inappropriate behaviour during pregnancy is increasingly viewed as child abuse. Since the 50s, dozens of US states have prosecuted women for using drugs while pregnant. If you can save a baby from the dangers of premature birth, would you not be prepared to save it from a reckless mother?
The greatest existential threat faced by unborn babies today doesn’t come from women “unfit” to be pregnant, but from unwilling mothers. Once a woman’s body is no longer the incubator, abortion can be both pro-choice and pro-life. In the ectogenetic future, foetuses aborted by mothers who didn’t want them to exist could be “rescued” and adopted. In that world, some women might seek out backstreet abortions that would end their babies’ lives, rather than legal ones that would allow them to live. It’s a horrifying thought. But it could happen if the foetus’s right to life trumps that of a woman to refuse to become a mother.
originally posted by: chr0naut
a reply to: infolurker
Aaaand wouldn't this be the diametric opposite of the abortion debate?
originally posted by: TzarChasm
originally posted by: chr0naut
a reply to: infolurker
Aaaand wouldn't this be the diametric opposite of the abortion debate?
Bumping for relevance.