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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

No, the right to abortion is not hinged on "fetal viability", it's "can the state force someone to undertake a medical procedure". Slapping "fetal viability" just means "can the state force someone to undertake a medical procedure to save someone else's life".

Very simply, every "a fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is no different from "if a person needs a kidney or they will die, and you are a match for that person, then you are required to give them your kidney".

Adding an artificial womb to this does not change that. All that changes is what medical procedure is being forced.

Artificial wombs would allow people who for whatever reason are unable to get or remain pregnant, to have a child without having a surrogate involved. It does nothing more than that.

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It changes that instead of killing a person you can carry the pregnancy to completion even if the mother wants to kill her unborn son/daughter.

Right now abortion consists often in dismembering the fetus, killing him/her and then scraping him/her from the womb.

Hopefully in the future we can extract them from the womb and put them in an artificial womb instead.

It's also great for surrogacy and the Men Gone Their Own Way movement.

At the same time I fear it will be weaponised by governments to create humans at will and create armies (before robots are more viable)

[ed: just noticed I'm replying to a throwaway account. Real great how these pro-birth commenters aren't willing to back their statements with their actual accounts]

> It changes that instead of killing a person you can carry the pregnancy to completion even if the mother wants to kill her unborn son/daughter.

If you can donate a kidney, and not doing so results in a person dying, there your decision not to kills them. More to the point, no one can force you to give up your kidney against your will. What you are saying is very clearly that the state should be able to just that.

> Hopefully in the future we can extract them from the womb and put them in an artificial womb instead.

Hopefully we can just force people to have a different forced medical procedure unlike the current one. After all, they're just women, it's not as if they have rights.

Also: embryos aren't people, the burning building test is really simple. Say a building is on fire, and you're running to escape and you come across a room containing a child and a load of fertilized eggs. Do you have to hesitate about grabbing the actual child?

> Very simply, every "a fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is no different from "if a person needs a kidney or they will die, and you are a match for that person, then you are required to give them your kidney".

Not sure if you're intentionally referencing Judith Jarvis Thompson's most famous (and in my opinion, greatest) essay with this comparison, but yeah, this is a common metaphor. The sick violinist and all.

But I think you may be discounting the role of viability too quickly, both in theory and in practice: in theory, because some bioethicists (I can't remember if JJT specifically falls into this camp, it's been a while) draw a distinction between terminating a pregnancy and actively destroying a fetus. They'd argue that it's fine to remove a gestating fetus from your body, but not so fine to tell the doctor performing the d&c "and make sure it's good and dead afterwards!" Under current medical practice, there's no practical difference between removal and "killing," simply because it's impossible for an underdeveloped fetus to survive outside the human womb... for now... dot dot dot...

And in practice, because fetal viability is often used to draw abortion boundaries in more permissable jurisdictions who don't restrict it outright. "Late term abortion" is a complicated issue, probably ill-suited for this forum, but viability is generally why you can't abort a healthy fetus three weeks before its natural due date.

It's worth noting the idea of "late term abortion" because that's an easy choice is super dismissive and harmful to the people who undergo it.

A late term abortion is something that happens by someone who intended to, and presumably wanted to, carry to term. Pete Buttigieg had an interview on the subject in which he rightly pointed to the fact that in the context of "late term abortion" we're talking about a case where someone (or couple) are intending to bring a child into the world, and have likely chosen a name, arranged a room, got clothes and such lined up. For such people the choice is unlikely to be easy or desired, just the least awful of myriad terrible options, in which case why should state legislation be involved? Certainly the state has no involvement on removing life support from others, why is it involved here? (Let's look at the Schiavo case where conservative politicians tried to force a husband to keep his dead wife "alive" because with sufficient technology that was "possible")

This is a bit disingenuous. "A fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is generally not the argument, the argument is "A fetus is a person and you should not be allowed to actively kill it."

If you can donate a kidney to save someone's life, and you choose not to, you have killed them, by your definition.

Alternatively, say you donated blood, and that blood is used to keep someone alive. Then they run out of that blood and need more, and you are the only option, but you've developed anemia or something, so no longer want to donate blood, by your own definition the state can now require you to keep giving blood anyway: This person is only alive now because of your actions, and your attempt to change those conditions would kill them.

Also the policy is "you should be forced to carry it to term", because abortion bans also come with a variety of bans on access to emergency contraceptives that would prevent it from even getting to the point of being a fetus in the first place, and the women-aren't-people crowd fight anything and everything else that would prevent many abortions occurring in the first place (access to contraceptives, actual sex ed, etc)

I mean, under current circumstances, "not allowed to terminate the pregnancy" does work out to "be forced to carry the fetus to term," because those are the only two outcomes here. Which is why artificial wombs throw an interesting wrench in things by suggesting the possibility of terminating a pregnancy while maintaining fetal development (and there's still a whole host of questions about whether forced artificial womb transplantation is ethical or ideal).

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