Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…A softball. Well, it’ll be interesting if we do actually develop artificial wombs, which I’m not 100 percent sure that we will. But supposing that we do, my expectation would be that it would be . . . It would create a weird cultural crisis for the kind of people who currently are pro-life, while also creating substantial political pressure in favor of the pro-life cause. And I’m not entirely sure how those two things would interact with one another. But you would clearly have a sort of deep religious resistance to the technology, to the practice, to that sort of severing, and you would have strong cultural resistance to it independent of religion. I think there would be a strong anti-artificial-womb . . . As in the crunchy bookstores of my childhood, there would be a left-wing, hippyish resistance to it as well. The question would be, How would that resistance to it interact with this possibility that here you have a technocratic solution to the abortion debate? But I’ll say I’m a little skeptical that, if you imagine . . . Again, it depends; how do you get to the artificial womb point? Is it something where — are you imagining a world where a woman gets pregnant and somehow the embryo is removed from her body and placed into the womb? That seems . . . requiring a level of technological intervention that would raise a host of the same privacy concerns and so on that motivate certain portions of the pro-choice side. Or are you envisioning a world where you have artificial wombs and everyone is provisionally sterilized at age 14? This becomes the state policy, and so on? So you could imagine a pro-life totalitarianism that emerged out of some combination of technologies. All of which is to say I don’t have a brilliant answer for your question, but I think there would be a lot of very strange and different cross currents that the people most inclined to make the pro-life argument right now would be disinclined to immediately run with whatever political possibilities had presented, but also that the nature of the technology, its level of invasiveness and what making it work would mean, would in turn determine where liberalism went, and so on. Next question.…

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