Nicholas Ramirez

According to some faithful prolife Catholic bioethicists, the potential creation of artificial womb technology (AWT) may provide an end to the abortion debate for both pro-abortion and prolife advocates. They contend that in cases where a pregnant mother desires to procure an abortion, the prolife advocate may accept partial ectogenesis (i.e., the transferring of the conceptus in utero into an artificial womb), as a licit alternative to abortion. While defenders of abortionwho have redefined the right to an abortion as a right to procure the death of the conceptus have rejected this proposal, it has found little opposition from prolife Catholics. In this paper, I argue that AWT cannot resolve the abortion debate for the faithful prolife Catholic. In the first section, I argue that the elective use of AWT is licit only when it is necessary to preserve the well-being of the conceptus or his mother. Elective partial ectogenesis (i.e., partial ectogenesis that is not medically necessary) is best described as an act of illicitly depriving the conceptus ofhis prima facie right to be gestated in his mother’s womb. In the second section, I argue that the use of AWT in lieu of abortion would further distort society’s perception of the beauty of the distinctly maternal, the importance of the mother–child relationship in pregnancy, and the distinction between the masculine and feminine which must be upheld. This paper does not answer the unresolved and important question of if and when ERDs 47 and 49 apply in light of techno-logical developments in AWT.

In this paper, I will argue that heterologous embryo transfer (HET) is malum in se because it involves a disordered use of a woman’s gestative faculty. Against most HET opponents, I will argue for and defend the distinction between the generative faculty or procreation and the gestative faculty or gestation, grounded in St. Thomas Aquinas’s explanation for how faculties are distinguished. Against the advocates of HET, I will argue that a thorough analysis of the gestative faculty and its natural object will help us to demonstrate why HET constitutes a disordered (and therefore illicit) use of a woman’s gestative faculty.

In this paper I argue that teleology and a proper teleological analysis of the uterus is important for a comprehensive understanding of the rights of the unborn. I argue that a right to life entails the right to use those organs that naturally function for an individual’s survival. Consequently, an unborn child has a right to his mother’s uterus. If this is accepted, bodily-rights arguments for abortion such as those proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson and David Boonin are completely undermined. While Thomson and Boonin may be justified in arguing the right to life does not always entail the right to use another person’s body, I argue that the right to life of the unborn does entail the right to use their mother’s body.