Imagine if unborn babies, at any gestation, could be removed from a mother’s body and implanted into an artificial womb. It seems like it would be the perfect compromise for pro-lifers and pro-abortion activists: women wouldn’t have to take the lives of unborn babies, and yet they wouldn’t have to be pregnant if they didn’t want to be. Win-win, right?
Unfortunately not — even this seemingly common-ground proposal has abortion extremists angry.
While the premise may sound like something right out of a Margaret Atwood novel, it is not some feminist dystopian nightmare; nor, for that matter, is the possibility of artificial wombs or gestation solely the creation of science fiction. The scenario is, as Professor Stephen Giles argues in the recent article “Does the Right to Elective Abortion Include the Right to Ensure the Death of the Fetus?”, a possible legal path forward for anti-abortion advocates to either render Roe v. Wade irrelevant or overturn it altogether.
… We must consider, however, that pregnant people’s bodies are already battlegrounds under the law, and that the very idea of the state stepping in and “rescuing” fetuses as early as conception completely erases women’s reproductive privacy rights—the rights that Roe v. Wade are supposed to enshrine.
… More importantly, Giles’ argument presumes without question that once a person is pregnant they somehow “owe” the state a live birth. This is a presumption with immediately dangerous consequences playing out in places like Tennessee, Alabama, Wisconsin, and Indiana, where prosecutors and judges are incarcerating women for being a perceived threat to their developing pregnancy.
… To be clear, advances in reproductive technology like the artificial womb have tremendous promise in improving the lives of many. But when scholars like Giles argue there is a “problem” with women having full autonomy over their reproductive selves, and that the legal “solution” is for the state to leverage that technology to remove that autonomy in the name of “expanding” choices for women, it’s imperative for reproductive rights advocates to take that argument seriously and head-on, lest we risk losing those rights altogether.
What Giles proposed was a state-sponsored fetal rescue program: women who did not feel ready or willing to have a baby would not have to. They would relinquish the unborn baby to the state, where the baby could gestate in an artificial womb, and the woman could give up being pregnant, without having to have an abortion. Yet because this threatens Roe v. Wade, and abortion, the pro-abortion extremists are against it.
These people slam pro-lifers for calling them anti-life, or pro-abortion, but things like this prove that the “anti-life” and “pro-abortion” labels are right on the nose. Even if abortion is literally no longer necessary, and women could end pregnancies without ending the life of the unborn baby, pro-abortion activists are still against it.
Abortion is their sacred cow, the thing they must defend and protect above all else. It isn’t women’s autonomy or reproductive rights they’re out to protect; this example of a fetal rescue program would satisfy that, because a woman who did not want to be pregnant would not have to be. But she wouldn’t have to undergo an abortion, and these extremists care more about abortion than they do anything else, even the women they claim to care so much about.
After all, a fetal rescue program would spare women the litany of health issues associated with abortion, including higher mortality rates, increased risk of pre-term birth in future pregnancies, mental health problems, suicidal tendencies, depression, and breast cancer. They are so fanatical about abortion that they’d rather women risk all of these things than give them an alternative.
Pro-choice? No. These extremists have proved that they, without a doubt, are pro-abortion, anti-life radicals.
