The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (May 28, 2008)

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28 May 2008 04:48 pm

The Future Of Abortion

...technology is going to make fetuses viable outside the womb earlier and earlier. In fact that is already happening. And eventually there will be artificial wombs, enabling doctors to extract a fetus from a pregnant woman during the first trimester with a procedure no more invasive or dangerous than abortion, and to keep that baby alive in an incubator.

Today we are used to thinking about a woman's right to end a pregnancy as the functional equivalent of ending the fetus's life. In the future, however, that need not be so. A woman could be afforded the right to end her pregnancy, but be denied the right to end the life of the fetus. Although I am not an expert in abortion jurisprudence, it is at least conceivable that this could happen without any need to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

The legitimate property interest that every woman has in her own body, and her right to be free of the state's interference in that respect, makes me a reluctant pro-choicer in the first trimester (for want of any better time limit). But if fetuses can live outside their mother's body, the debate shifts a notch. Not definitively, but intuitively.

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