From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 20 2000 - 18:47:51 MST
At 12:54 PM 20/01/00 EST, QueeneMUSE@aol.com wrote:
><< Women's bodies are changed
> drastically by that clump of cells, and their minds, and their emotions,
>Why the sacred cow?
If we used a sacred cow, the situation might be easier to cope with. :)
>I think artificial wombs *might* make having babies much less of an ordeal,
>and a large percentage of women would opt for it, [+ reductionism is good
for your head, etc, snipped]
But we started out talking *abortion* and cryopreserving the foetuses of
women with an abhorrence of abortion who nevertheless do not wish to remain
pregnant.
Merrily explaining to an anguished woman that hey, it's okay, it's just
expelling a gob of cells, like blowing your nose , does not seem to me an
especially sensitive way to act. (Of course it is literally true; and a
Michelangelo is just a bunch of chemicals, and M-theory a bunch of
scratches on paper.)#
Again, I'm talking about a pregnancy advanced enough to be *felt* by the
woman, to be *experienced* and *interpreted* . Swallowing a morning-after
booster dose of the pill, or RU-486, is presumably very different and far
easier/preferable.
Routinely gestating babies for the whole nine yards in an artifical womb
might yet turn out to have odd effects on the respect and affection we
accord each other, as infancy in a state orphanage does, but I don't think
that'd be inevitable - premmies in humidicribs seem to tug heartstrings
even more than healthy normal births.
Damien [one of `the moral guardians out there', Elizabeth?]
# ah, I see Lee Crocker has used the same analogy, with somewhat similar
intent, I think
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