Opposition to Artificial Wombs is Obviously Status Quo Bias
There is not a good principled objection to them based on our intuitive feeling of uncomfortablility when we hear about the idea
1 Shock and artificial wombs
Lots of people are disgusted and horrified when they first hear about the idea of artificial wombs. They claim that artificial wombs—which are hypothetical future technologies that would be able to produce babies without them being implanted in a parent—are frightening and horrifying. Occasionally they’ll have specific objections, but more common is just a guttural cry of horror at the idea that we’d have artificial wombs, the way most would have at hearing that society’s year plan is to reenact the Handmaid’s tale.
This is, I think clearly wrong and produced by status quo bias. To see if something is produced by status quo bias, it makes sense to imagine if things were opposite whether we’d have the same opposition. I present you the following dialogue, from a hypothetical world in which artificial wombs are the mainstream.
L: So I have this crazy idea about changing the way we give birth.
J: You what?
L: I have a crazy idea about how we should have baby humans.
J: Okay, what is it?
L: So you know how we currently produce babies in machines that pump out happy, healthy babies? They’re not invasive, people can just do them.
J: Of course I do.
L: So, I was thinking—what if we changed things a bit? Instead of making babies in a machine, we could have them be produced in the human body—specifically women’s, of course; how would they get out of the man’s body.
J: What in the world? This sounds horrific—and dystopian. How would the baby even get out of the woman’s body.
L: So, about that. I was thinking a few ways. One way would be what’s called a C-section. Surgical incisions would be done and then the baby would be pulled out. The other way would be that we would, well, pull the baby out through the women’s vagina.
J: The baby wouldn’t even fit there!
L: Yeah, so the woman’s vagina would expand considerably—no doubt it would be extremely painful and lethal, but we could drug her up so she doesn’t mind thaaat much.
J: Good heavens! Do you plan on doing that with other goods? Is this how you would propose making sandwiches? Having them grow inside of women and then come out through their vaginas after many months. Why in the world would we do this? This sounds unpleasant and invasive for many months—not to mention it would raise weird questions about whether the woman gets to destroy the baby if it’s part of her body.
L: Well, a few reasons. One is, and maybe you won’t share this judgment, but I just think our status quo institutions sound frightening and dystopian. Also, this would be similarly invasive to all people, while the status quo produces a gap between the rich and the poor.
J: Let me get this straight. You want to make it so that we change our time-tested institution of artificial wombs so that it doesn’t sound dystopian to you—and you alone, I might add.
L: That’s right.
J: So how would the embryo get inside the woman? I assume she’d have to sign a contract of some sort, the way it works now.
L: Ah, so about that—I had a erm, slightly different idea. Instead of making this well planned and thought out, we could make it accompany having sex. You know, that thing that is disproportionately done by teenagers that don’t think things through. We could use this mechanism—which they already do—to produce lots of babies, many of them out of wedlock.
J: That’s the plan?? Really? Should we make the same happen when people play sports also, to trick unwilling recipients into having to either chop up their embryo or getting it?
L: Yeah, thinking this through more, this sounds pretty bizarre and unnecessary. I guess I’ll keep working on cold fusion—something more promising.
2 Pregnancy is bizarre
As the last section illustrated, pregnancy is bizarre. No sane person would choose to invent it, relative to artificial wombs if it didn’t already exist. So why is it that so many people oppose artificial wombs and support pregnancy?
The answer is, very obviously, status quo bias. This bias is, as the name would suggest, a bias towards the status quo, towards not changing things. A bias against novelty, towards orthodoxy and stagnation. We have quite a considerable wealth of evidence for the prevalence of this bias. People just want to keep things as they are.
So, given the prevalence of this bias, we should expect it to influence our decision-making. When we see a case in which we oppose a good thing for no explicable reason, we should attribute that to status quo bias. Status quo bias often takes the form of talk about Chesterton’s fence or talking about worries of the deleterious effect that things will have on institutions, even if no coherent mechanism is given to explain how it would have a deleterious effect.
As the last section explained, pregnancy is bizarre. We only treat pregnancy as non-dystopian and horrific because it’s so deeply engrained that we treat it as sane and normal. But pregnancy is clearly not optimal—it puts an enormous strain on women, results in tons of abortions (which might be very bad or maybe not), and much more.
When something sounds weird and might exist in the future, we should expect status quo bias—as well as a host of other biases like just world biases—to make us believe that it would be horrible. Thus, given this expectation, the mere fact that something sounds horrific and dystopian shouldn’t lead us to discount it—because we’d expect that same feeling of unease even if it was terrible.
Thus, this feeling of guttural horror is not a good reason to reject artificial wombs.
3 But what about what the people say when they try to rationalize their status quo bias—is any of that persuasive? (Spoiler alert: no).
This section has a harsh—not to mention a wordy—title; why is it that I claim that those who devise arguments against artificial wombs are just trying to rationalize status quo bias? Isn’t that unfair?
I’ll answer the first question first: the reason that I claim that those who devise arguments against artificial wombs are just trying to rationalize status quo bias is because those who devise arguments against artificial wombs are just trying to rationalize status quo bias. And to answer the second question—no, it’s not unfair.
We know that people very often start with a conclusion and then reason backward from there. They do not do this consciously—consciously, they do not generally evaluate their method of evidence evaluation at all.
If these arguments were what justified the conclusion, we should expect them to be pretty good arguments—rather than obviously terrible arguments that would only convince someone who was already convinced of the conclusion. Just like the theist who sets out looking for evidence to strengthen their faith and mysteriously finds that the evidence for theism totally blows to smithereens the evidence for atheism, so too does the person who starts with the assumption that artificial wombs are immoral start with a conclusion and then reason backward from there.
This article is a decent summary of the arguments that the people opposed to artificial wombs make. And, as is standard, it’s utterly unpersuasive.
For some women, using an artificial womb for gestation to continue might seem like a welcome alternative to terminating a pregnancy. But there are fears that other women thinking about an abortion might be compelled to use an artificial womb to continue gestation.
This is utterly unpersuasive. If something makes pregnancy less onerous, and thus makes people less likely to terminate their pregnancies, pro-choicers and pro-lifers should both recognize that that’s a great thing. Pro-choicers should favor it because it gives women extra choices about whether to carry a pregnancy to term. Pro-lifers should favor it because it would reduce the number of abortions. If a person is deciding whether to make a choice, and then one of their options becomes better, and they decide not to make the choice, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, unless the choice they choose is inherently good. But even pro-choice people don’t claim that abortion is generally good—just that it’s important to be able to choose it—thus; on the pro-choice view, this is still an improvement.
4 Do rich babies deserve to be nutritionally deficient
Artificial wombs might also further increase the gap between rich and poor. Wealthy prospective parents may opt to pay for artificial wombs, while poorer people will rely on women’s bodies to gestate their babies. Existing disparities in nutrition and exposure to pathogens between pregnancies across socio-economic divides could also be exacerbated.
This is really absurd. For one, after we have efficient artificial wombs, they’d likely be covered by insurance if they provided a superior product. For another, they’d be likely to become cheaper over time—maybe at first only a select wealthy clientele could afford them, but over time this would probably reverse.
Thus, just on factual grounds, this is unfounded. But there’s a much more important problem with it—it is bad actually when rich babies are nutritionally deficient. The worry here is, quite literally, that if we do something that makes rich babies more nutritionally deficient, it might exacerbate inequality. Yes. And? Inequality is bad primarily because it leaves people rich off—harming rich babies for no reason is a bad idea. It doesn’t benefit poor babies; it just leaves the rich babies more nutritionally deficient.
This is totally backward, upside-down thinking; the idea is that it’s good to make rich babies worse off, for no reason, to reduce inequality. Would the author suggest that it would be good if Lamborghinis emitted harmful pollutants that caused babies to become malformed? This would reduce inequality! Exposure to pathogens could become even more unequal. No—of course not! This is absurd!
And yet, when in the grip of status quo bias, people begin to find this ridiculous reasoning persuasive. They begin to think that harming rich babies for no reason is good, just because it would reduce inequality.
5 Rounding out the objections
This raises issues of distribution of access. Will artificial wombs receive government funding? If it does, who should decide who gets subsidized access? Will there be a threshold to meet?
This is a fully general objection to any new technology. In any case of new technology, it will be the case that there are hard questions about whether government will subsidize it and in which cases. It seems to make sense to treat it just like general healthcare.
Other issues concern potential discrimination individuals born via an artificial womb may face. How do we prevent discrimination or invasive publicity and ensure individuals’ origin stories are not subject to negative public curiosity or ridicule?
This is a bizarre worry. Who would care whether people are born by artificial wombs? This is like worrying about C-sections because people will bully others based on C-section. Why in the world would anyone care? How would would-be discriminators discriminate based on…the environment.
Again, we regard these objections as absurd when applied to known things. Yet they sound just plausible enough to be a justification for banning artificial wombs, because they sound weird.
6 Conclusion
There are certainly some technical and practical issues with artificial wombs. It’s not clear that they’ll work. But if they do, there are no good moral objections to them. All of the attempts at generating them are merely flimsy attempts to prop up our status quo bias which opposes them because they sound weird and dystopian. This is just one of numerous examples of various biases—especially status quo bias—infecting our thinking and making us believe absurd positions based on insubstantial justification.
Related reading: https://www.liveaction.org/news/bioethicist-proposes-women-vegetative-states-surrogates/