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Will artificial wombs merge the pro-life and pro-choice positions?
Resolves based on public opinion polling of Americans. A majority needs to support banning traditional abortion in favor of transitioning to artificial wombs.
Terminology:
Pro-life: Right to life of fetus.
Pro-choice: Right to choose termination of pregnancy.
Artificial womb: Device enabling pregnancy termination while preserving fetal life.
Related questions
I think you meant to reply to my comment but accidentally made a new theead.
If that was the case then the slogans "my body my choice", "safe, legal, and rare", and "reproductive health" wouldn't exist. The slogan would be "let my partner and I try again another time", without any mentions to the woman's body, health, and rarity.
As for the "not prepared" argument, that is another reason some are pro-life, as the mere state of being unprepared isn't a reason to kill a fetus and prevent them from living their life through adoption or foster care.
You're correct that the main reason someone procures an abortion is for financial reasons (social reasons can be ignored because the question is asking about public opinion, if public opinion changes to support artificial wombs over traditional abortion then that means the social attitudes have changed already). The answer to this could be a reformed child care benefit system. Some reports show that child care can "pay itself off" because those children will be economically beneficial in the future. This is very important as there's a looming demographic crisis for the retired to working age population ratio, threatening retirement benefits. If the childlessness trend continues, it will only hurt society, artificial wombs can keep the economy afloat by bringing birth rates back to replacement levels. All this could make the artificial wombs gain popularity over traditional abortion. Obviously we can't know for sure how the public debate will play out but these are powerful arguments in my opinion.
I was searching and I found this liberal magazine talking about how adoption isn't the answer. For a good chunk of the article they talk about the pain of pregnancy as a fundamental reason it should remain legal. So clearly my point has merit. After that, they then switch to the financial argument, saying that foster care and adoption services aren't funded enough to deal with the amount of children, and that most women with unwanted pregnancies don't choose adoption anyways, leading to their own financial hardship. The article unfortunately gives no policy proposals on how to fix it, merely attacks the system. Once again, reformed child care benefits could reduce the rate of needing to put up children for adoption.
The term "abortion" refers to the termination of pregnancy, not of life, so we should use the term "traditional abortion", since terminating a pregnancy by instead using an artificial womb would also be an abortion. If it becomes unpopular enough, traditional abortion could then be disambiguated as "murder-abortion", similar to "murder-suicide".
From my position, even if artificial wombs don't end up having a similar cost and operation time as traditional abortion, it would become untenable to hold the belief that traditional abortion remain legal.
We already have a sizeable portion of the population, depending on the poll, ranging from 10-20%, who already want it made illegal, and a further 50% who support restrictions. That's people already saying the process of 9 months of pregnancy along with everything else it brings isn't enough to invalidate the life of the fetus.
If the process of moving the fetus to an artificial womb can make the woman's pregnancy last just weeks or hours, instead of 9 months, public opinion would expand that 10-20% massively. There would be little sympathy and support for the idea that an hour-long operation is too inconvenient or discomforting to kill a fetus, compared with the current 9 month process (plus some other long term effects).
That's just my opinion though so we'll see what happens in a few decades time