One of the questions I’ve asked myself and others regarding abortion is to think about what abortion might look like if humans weren’t mammals, and were instead reptiles, or birds, or fish, or another animal that lays eggs rather than gestates their young inside their (female) bodies. If “abortion” involves destroying, or just recklessly abandoning, a fertilised egg, would abortion be more or less controversial than it is for mammals? Would it have more or less political support? Would it be more or less common as a social practice?

What’s interesting is that I haven’t seen any consensus. I have encountered pro-life and pro-choice people who believe that abortion would be less acceptable to egg-laying humans than it is to mammalian humans, and I have also encountered pro-life and pro-choice people who think the opposite. I move back and forth on the question myself, but I was always fairly certain of two things. First, to egg-laying humans, abortion would not be seen as a women’s issue, by either side. Second, bodily rights would not feature as part of any abortion debate – the debate would focus exclusively on the moral status, or personhood, of the “unborn/unhatched”.

As interesting as these questions are to reflect on, the thing that makes these cases relevant is developments in ectogenesis for human embryos – in other words, artificial wombs. Based on my egg-laying human musings, I had assumed it was a given that successful ectogenesis would substantially change, if not end, the abortion debate. The gender element would disappear, the bodily rights portion would disappear, and even the personhood element would take on a different flavour: even if people couldn’t agree that the unborn are our moral equals, most people do believe that unborn babies have at least some inherent value. Since the costs of protecting the unborn would be substantially lowered by artificial wombs, ectogenesis might change the point at which most people think the value of unborn human beings merits giving their lives protection.Last April, however, I read an article by Rosalind Moran and Jolie Zhou that challenged those assumptions. At first, the article seemed to agree that ectogenesis removed the gender dimension from pregnancy and childbirth:

[Ectogenesis] could enable people with wombs to reproduce as easily as cisgender men do: without risks to their physical health, their economic safety, or their bodily autonomy. By removing natural gestation from the process of having children, ectogenesis could offer an equal starting point for people of all sexes and genders

One paragraph later, however, we are treated to this gem:

ectogenesis could also wreak havoc on the hard-fought right of women and people with wombs to access safe and legal abortion, and could significantly weaken abortion policies worldwide.

Though ectogenesis would make it possible to avoid pregnancy without ending the fetus’s life, such an outcome is not necessarily a positive from a feminist point of view. The reality is that some women who choose abortion do so not only to end the pregnancy—preserving bodily autonomy—but also to avoid becoming a biological mother. Ectogenesis would still make her a biological mother against her will, and using it as an alternative to traditional abortion could therefore violate her reproductive autonomy.

I have to give the authors kudos for honesty. They don’t even pretend to grapple with whether a woman is justified in choosing abortion in order to avoid being a biological mother. They simply present it as a reason for abortion, plain and simple. I find it so interesting here that there is no mention of the fact that men don’t get a say in whether they become biological fathers. The only mention of fathers in the article is to consider the situation where a woman does not want to be a biological mother but the man in question does want to be a biological father, and artificial wombs are presented as a negative in this context. The converse scenario, where a woman wants to be a biological mother but the man in question does not want to be a biological father, is not discussed.

In fairness, the authors do nod towards this discrepancy:

Even if a legal system has absolved a biological mother of legal obligations toward her biological child, she might still feel a sense of obligation toward the child or guilt toward herself, for not enshrining the self-sacrificing qualities often idealized and associated with motherhood.

The implication is that self-sacrificing qualities are not idealised or associated with fatherhood, and so unwanted biological motherhood has a greater burden associated with it than biological fatherhood. I’m not sure whether I buy the “idealisation” part of this argument, but let’s say for a moment that I do: this presents us with a bit of a quandary. Ben and I discussed unchosen burdens on an episode of our podcast, and whether and how accepting unchosen burdens needs to become part and parcel of building a pro-life society, and Ben explored these themes further in a recent blog post. The reason these questions are relevant is because there is no doubt that parenthood does involve self-sacrifice – almost literally. You can feel like you totally lose your identity, and therefore yourself, when you become a parent – and where I do agree with Moran and Zhou is that this experience tends to be felt more keenly by mothers than fathers. It’s hard to see how rejecting abortion would not require accepting this unchosen self-sacrifice by women (ideally by men also, but that’s a separate issue).

What’s the way out of this? First, I think we should acknowledge the demand for abortion will almost certainly remain, even if we get artificial wombs nailed down. The arguments for abortion will become far flimsier, but the demand will remain, and abortion itself may remain – after all, the arguments for abortion as things are right now, while not exactly flimsy, do not stand up to real scrutiny, and yet abortion rights are part and parcel of most modern Western democracies. We are probably engaging in wishful thinking if we think flimsier arguments for abortion means an end to permissive abortion regimes.

Furthermore, there may be a chicken and egg (no pun intended) problem here. Do we need to encourage broader acceptance of unchosen burdens, in order to shift society towards a position where abortion is more likely to be rejected? Or do we need to simply argue that the moral status of the unborn mean that their welfare is a burden that must be borne, even if not chosen? After all, Moran, Zhou and many others imply, if not state, that men must shoulder the unchosen burden of parenthood. Can we rely on the intellectual soundness of the pro-life position to lead enough people to conclude that the unchosen burdens that pregnancy and parenthood inflict on women must also be shouldered? Or must we cultivate an acceptance of unchosen burdens as a precursor to opening minds enough to be able to accept the soundness of pro-life arguments?

The systematising part of me wants the answer to the first of these questions to be yes, but the realist – or perhaps the behavioural scientist – in me thinks that perhaps we have to do the latter – or, at the very least, we have to do both. It’s an uphill climb, but articles like Moran’s and Zhou’s tend not to discourage me. Instead, they remind me that there is so much more to the abortion debate than pointing at ultrasounds and talking about fingers and toes, which makes me believe that maybe, if the pro-life movement were to add these wider arguments to our toolkit, we might make the real progress we’ve been striving for for decades. At a minimum, it’s worth a try.

Muireann