Technological Progress Will Hurt the Pro-Abortion Movement
The abortion pill will make abortuaries more taboo and less profitable.
The Left often sees itself as being on the side of technology. Many Leftists don’t think that Leftism is good so much as they think it is inevitable. They see conservatives as quaint Don Quixotes who don’t understand the inevitable march of history. Marx himself presented Communism as an inevitability.
That view is partly a product of survivorship bias. Leftists remember their victories, and they conveniently forget about the issues on which they lose. For example, in the 1970s the Left promoted pederasty and pedophilia. Michel Foucault (who had a fondness for 17 year old male prostitutes) and other French Leftist thinkers advocated for the abolition of age of consent laws. The non-profit Pedophile Information Exchange advocated for sex between adults and young children. Conservatives broke the momentum of the pro-pedophilia movement in the 1980s, but the movement remained in good standing within the wider LGBT+ movement until the 1990s.
An even clearer example was the eugenics movement. In the early twentieth century, eugenics was seen as a part of the march of scientific progress. It was supported by the Progressives of the time such as Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger. Opponents of eugenics were backwoods troglodytes who had more faith in the Bible than in modern science. The Leftists of the time believed - with some justification - that eugenics was the science-based way of the future and that conservatives were railing against the inevitable.
But the conservatives won on the eugenics issue. Eugenics was completely anathematized for decades. And now it is extremely unlikely that eugenics will ever make a comeback because we have the new technology of embryo selection. The eugenicists argued that people with inferior genes had to be sterilized because otherwise they would pass those genes on to the next generation. But if the removal of inferior genes from the gene pool is really so important, it can now be done by selecting genetically healthy embryos, no sterilization required.
However there have been some cases where new technologies have contributed to the decline of conservative social norms. Birth control pills contributed to the sexual revolution and television broke the authority of local community leaders. Unfortunately, transgenderism is another issue on which technology is on the Left’s side. As technology improves, interventions to make a person appear like the opposite sex will get more and more effective.
Abortion
The rise of widespread abortion was facilitated by advances in technology. For most of history abortion was a very dangerous process. In 1900 abortion was rare. Today there’s about 1 abortion for every 4 births.
The abortion pill is a recent invention. It was first approved by the FDA in 2000. Abortion pills made up the majority of abortions for the first time in 2020. The pill can be used to perform abortions up to 10 weeks.
Because of the abortion pill, there is no longer a realistic way to use the law to forbid most abortions. States can pass laws against abortion pills as much as they like, but when abortion pills come discreetly through the mail, abortion bans will become about as effective as marijuana bans, which is to say: not very effective.
Some Republicans want abortion to be totally banned. Other Republicans don’t feel strongly about very early abortions, but oppose late term abortion. The official Republican platform mentions opposition to late term abortion, not early term abortion.
About 60% of Republicans think that abortion should be either totally illegal or legal only in certain cases such as rape or threat to the mother’s life. 58% percent of Democrats want abortion to be legal past the 3 month mark.
The impact of the abortion pill will strengthen the moderate Republican position and weaken the Democrat and hard-line anti-abortion positions. Here’s why: as more and more early (pre 10 weeks) abortions are done with the abortion pill, late term surgical abortion will become a larger and larger share of the work done by Planned Parenthood and other abortuaries. This will change the public image of abortuaries. A place where people can go to get condoms or to get an 8 week abortion doesn’t sound so bad to most people. But as abortuaries increasingly become defined by gruesome late term abortion, the public will view them more negatively. Society may begin to perceive a clear moral line between pill abortions and surgical abortions. A woman who gets a pill abortion at 6 weeks might think to herself: “at least I didn’t go to that horrible place where they cut fetuses up with knives”.
Furthermore, surgical abortions are much more profitable than pill abortions. Right now an abortionist can make a few hundred dollars for a pill abortion via telehealth, but the price will inevitably come down. Organizations like Aid Access send abortion pills through the mail and make only about $100 per abortion, compared to the thousands of dollars that Planned Parenthood makes for every surgical abortion. As the abortion pill reduces the number of surgical abortions procured every year, Planned Parenthood’s revenue will decrease.
As early term pill abortions become an increasingly large share of all abortions and later term surgical abortions become more rare, the later term surgical abortions will seem more and more like an aberration, like a barbaric intrusion.
Artificial Wombs
Artificial Wombs that gestate from conception to birth are still science fiction, but artificial wombs that can gestate a 20 week old fetus to term may be here within the decade.
Part of the justification for abortion is the idea that pregnancy requires the use of the mother’s body against her will, and that this is a violation of her rights. But when artificial wombs are developed, pro-lifers will have an easy answer. The woman can end the pregnancy immediately and place the fetus in an artificial womb where it can develop to term. No further use of her body is needed and so no violation of her rights is required!
Most women who get abortions would probably not be ok with this solution. They don’t want to have a child of theirs out in the world. Contra feminist philosophers, the motivation isn’t really about the bodily inconvenience of pregnancy. But when artificial wombs are available, women who want abortions will have to say that explicitly. They will no longer be able to hide behind the excuse that they want to “end the pregnancy.” When they say “take this fetus out of me” they will also have to say “and don’t put the fetus in an artificial womb. I don’t want it to survive.” That’s much harder to sell to the public.
Key Takeaway #1: The abortion pill has only been available in America since 2000. As it becomes more widespread, abortuaries will become more taboo, since early term abortions will nearly always be handled at home. Abortuaries will increasingly be focused on late term abortions, which are very unpopular with the public.
Key Takeaway #2: As the abortion pill becomes more widespread, the abortion industry will become less profitable because pills are much cheaper than surgical abortion procedures and require less labor from abortion workers.
Key Takeaway #3: Artificial wombs to gestate fetuses from 20 weeks onward will destroy one of the main arguments for abortion. It will be very difficult to argue that a woman should be able to kill a fetus at 20 weeks if there is the option to put the fetus into an artificial womb to be fully gestated.
I suspect that also if what happens comes to pass, the leftists will claim that they did not lose. They will say, we supported these things before abortion pills were a thing, and we were fighting against the connectionist religious right. Back then there were no artificial wombs, so it was really bodily autonomy. In a similar way, Palestinian nationalism is a losing cause. But I suspect the leftist retrospective might be just that they were upset about the Gazan civilian deaths, and they will conveniently omit the part where they said they wanted to destroy Israel or say, not totally without justification, it was mostly just a few noisy radicals. They will say, Biden supported Israel and wanting to bring the Saudis into the Abraham Accords. I know some leftists who talk about protesting the Korean War and they say it was because of the draft and civilian casualties. I'm sure some supported Kim il-Sung. But those are kind of just memory holed. Trans rights is another one, they will just say that it was about being nice and not misgendering adults and letting them transition, an they will say the puberty blocker stuff was just a few noisy radicals and minimize it. Forced sterilization (also known as "20th century eugenics") and pedophilia are two cases where it is more awkward. They will say forced sterilization was a really long time ago, and pedophilia was only a fringe minority. And they will memory hole it. I expect that the reaction in all of these cases will be a combination of memory holing and making excuses.
Great point about pederasty being a leftist position they actually lost on. I don’t think that eugenics is “progressive” in the same way though as say something like called “same sex marriage.” Early progressivism in a way still had nationalist elements and acknowledged HBD and would have never advocated for mass migration for example. However as the logic of atheism unfolds it necessarily leads to postmodern nonsense and undermines the superiority of race/clan/tribe into individualist consumers which makes people turn to wokeism for meaning. So originally progressivism was solving all the problems with science (think the white mans burden) but it eventually loses that North Star and devolves into gay race communism