ray245 wrote:I was wondering, is it better for women to give their child up for adoption as compared to abortion, if they don't mind carrying the child, but not raising him/her?
I was wondering if there has been research done on allowing the child to gestate inside a artifical gestation chamber or soemthing like that? Not only does it give women who do not want to carry a child another option, but pregnant women do not have to suffer some of the burden when they are carrying a child.
I seriously think that pro-choice supporters should provide more support in this field of research.
Bluntly, the pro-choice lobby doesn't care what you think, especially when you bring up a topic that has been the study of medical research for decades and act as if it's your own bright idea.
But it's not a big focus of pro-choicers. There's a limited amount of attention that can be given to any given issue by any given pro-choice lobby, and research on ectogenesis (that's what it's called) is fairly low down on the list for those lobbies with all the other anti-choice bullshit going on lately - HHS trying to define contraception as abortion, "conscience clauses" (i.e. a doctor or hospital could refuse to give abortions, even early ones, for religious reasons) even for medical facilities receiving federal funding. Since medical research is so expensive and nothing is guaranteed, and there are other threats to reproductive rights, ectogenesis research is pretty far down on the list.
There has been little research done on whether women would actually
choose ectogenesis if it were an option. An Australian ethicist named Leslie Cannold interviewed a few women on precisely this scenario for her book "The Abortion Myth", which was published in 2001. She asked the the following question of women who would seriously consider abortion if they got pregnant now:
You are two months pregnant. You cannot raise the child and so must decide between having an abortion or carrying the child to term and giving it up for adoption. As you consider these options, a doctor approaches you and informs you about a wonderful new option. Thanks to technology, it is now possible for you to abort your fetus without killing it. Your fetus can be extracted from your body and transferred to an artificial womb, where it will be grown for nine months and then put up for adoption. "Are you interested?" he asks.
I can't get you the numbers because I haven't actually read Cannold's book. I know of her research from a professor of mine - though you can read a few parts of her book on Google Books
here. According to my professor, a large majority of the pro-choice women Cannold interviewed actually said that they would prefer abortion over ectogenesis + adoption. I can't say I really understand this result myself. At all. Luckily, my applied ethics class (where I learned about this research) has an online discussion section, so I can quote some of my female classmates to explain their reasoning. Please excuse the bad writing.
I do not know whether I would pick this option if I were deciding, because it would be very difficult going on with life knowing you have a child born somewhere and under the care of someone and just not knowing who or where.
I would have to side with the majority of women in this matter. If I had to pull my fetus out of my body and take no responsibility for it whatsoever, I don't think I could live my life knowing I had birthed a child that I was never going to see or take care of. I think women would choose the abortion because it would relieve a sense of guilt from their conscience. They would not have to go through the entire process of adoption and giving up a fetus that could've turned into their child.
...so now we can consider that there are women who don't want to go through the realities of childbirth (eliminated by ectogenesis) and those who disapprove of their progeny inhabiting the earth without being included in said progeny's lives (not eliminated by ectogenesis, and relative to adoption cases).
Maybe many women prefer that all of their children be those that they can care for themselves. I don't know if this can be justified morally.
I think the reason women would choose ectogenesis would have the feeling that if they're going to get rid of the problem (pregnancy), they want to get rid of it completely in attempt to rid their conscious of what happened.
Living and knowing that your child exists would still, I belive, produce a feeling of responsibility. The responsibility is the big issue.
That's the vein that most of it is in. Like I said, I don't understand it. I wouldn't hesitate to choose ectogenesis myself if it were an option. But that's partly because a child of mine would have a good chance of finding a good home: I live in a first-world country, I'm young (so low chance of e.g. Down's Syndrome), I have no serious genetic diseases that I know of, and most importantly, I'm white. (White children have a good chance of being adopted in the US.)
I mean encouraging women to give their child up for adoption, even if abortion is allowed. That instead of outright banning of abortion, certain groups can choose to encourage adoption instead?
Meaning the choice of the women is respected, but more forms of social benefits can be given to women who choose to give their child up for adoption as compared to aborting them.
Um, nearly every woman who chooses abortion goes through counseling first. You're
not the first person to think of this. And there are plenty of "crisis pregnancy centers" that exist
solely to talk women out of having abortions. They are run by fundamentalist Christians and their
modus operandi is to lie and exaggerate about the side effects of abortion.
You are proposing to provide abortions to women only after you have needled them and cajoled them to change their minds about a decision that was already tremendously difficult to make in the first place. Do you really think that women choose to have abortions lightly? If a woman is down at the Planned Parenthood clinic, it's because she has considered all the options and concluded that abortion would be the best thing for her mental, physical and emotional well-being. She doesn't need more pressure from well-meaning men who think she should have to carry a baby around in her uterus for nine months when she wants nothing to do with it afterward. Counseling should be and is provided for abortion patients, but it should be impartial counseling that considers
her best interests first and foremost - far above the interests of an early fetus with no mental development, whose life is of extremely dubious moral value.