Medical research could have found the solution to the intractable pro-life, pro-choice argument

OUR abortion debate reveals how intractable the pro-choice and pro-life positions have become (Write Back, October 7/October 10). Two absolute visions of morality seem to be permanently clashing, unable to bridge the differences.

Precious Life and other lobby groups like it advance an absolute ban on abortion, even for rape victims, or fatal foetal abnormalities, based on their own religious vision about the “sacredness” of all cellular manifestations of human life, whatever their development.

The pro-choice lobby recognises that abortion does not involve two lives able to suffer equally: the foetus, lacking a fully developed nervous system and brain, is not capable of suffering, while the woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term does suffer. So, to proscribe abortion is to increase the net suffering in the world.

Well, a solution to please all has now become possible through technology. There are reports from the frontiers of medical research that an artificial womb with imitation placenta is being perfected and has been tested.

So, soon, every woman who is seeking an abortion could undergo a transfer of her foetus to such a womb instead and the foetus allowed to develop into a child, which should then be handed to a pro-life advocate to raise.

This way, the suffering of the unwanted pregnancy is prevented and the life, which would have been prevented from developing owing to the circumstances of the reluctant mother, is saved by the pro-lifers, as they claim to desire.

Oh, brave new world which has such possibilities in it.