A reader writes:
If, at some point in the future when the technology has been developed, abortion is banned in favour of using artificial wombs, America will need a million such devices to do the job. I imagine that medical equipment that complex will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and up - an Iraq War sized start-up cost.
No company would want to bear the duty of care implied by operating the machines, so the whole thing will have to be done by the government, perhaps through the existing public healthcare system, which is ill-equipped for the task. Population growth rockets, which has mixed effects, but mostly negative ones for the first two decades; poverty almost inevitably increases due to there being more disadvantaged kids. Adopted kids will have to conceal that fact or face taunting about being living abortions. Many will also have to learn at some point that that is what they are.
The argument from intuition is actually what I fear - perhaps the scenario above will play out, which is bad enough in my eyes, or more likely the mere existence of such devices will be used by social conservatives to stop all abortion. The choices will then be either to carry a fetus to term or pay privately, if you can, for the cost of its incubation and adoption.
Another adds:
The idea of being able to save the fetus while allowing the woman to no longer deal with the pregnancy sounds great on first read, the question then becomes what to do with all these fetuses that are now becoming babies with no parents. Our current services can't handle all the foster children, and I don't see the need to add more children to that equation. My college room mate grew up a foster child because her parents were constantly in jail or addicted to various drugs, and it is not a life to be envied. She experienced physical abuse, was required to go pick up her foster mother's drugs for her, and generally was a statistical anomaly when she was able to get into an excellent undergrad school. As a black female, she had no chance of being adopted. Until we can take care of children who are naturally conceived and then enter the foster care system, I see no reason to further burden it.
Yet another adds:
Sounds like a horror picture to me. Fetuses taken from women (unwillingly?) by the federal abortion police, brought to term in state owned incubators, turned over at "birth" to state orphanages, or in the case of surpluses, disposed of ....how? God help save us from such "technology". Fewer people want to be parents anymore - too costly, to much trouble - and so lets hand the whole apparatus to a state bureaucracy for the raising of fetuses.