It might sound evil, but the Church also teaches we are not obligated to use extraordinary means to extend life. IVF is quite extraordinary, and the embryos still could die in the process.
Do we really want to content ourselves with the bare minimum? The rabbi wasn’t obliged to help the maimed hebrew man he saw in the street, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be like the samaritan.
I believe combatting eugenics is a very worthy goal. Recent history has shown us that eugenics is often associated with death. In the hope of protecting lives through implanting the currently frozen embryos, there’s a good possibility it will entrench death for future ones.
Britain recently released numbers of how many embryos have been destroyed in their IVF processes since the nineties. It was one or two million, I think. With all the concern about climate change and poverty, are we truly able to believe the world community would be willing to suddenly welcome the influx of human life should we have artificial wombs to give them all a chance? I don’t think so. And those are numbers just from one country. Eugenics would happen.
I agree that Eugenics is one of the worst lies humanity came up with, but the reason it is so evil and results in so much death is that it revolves around the idea that some humans do not belong. Eugenics is why children with down syndrome are disproportionately more likely to get aborted, despite how many people with that disorder go on to live productive lives.
The thing about societies, governments, and countries is that they are not living organisms in themselves. WE decide what they want, what they welcome, and what they reject. So if we don’t want eugenics to happen then WE can prevent it by deciding that it is bad. Artificial Wombs have the potential to be used as a eugenic tool, just like nuclear power has the potential to end all life on earth multiple times over; it depends on how we as members of society choose to utilize the technology.
The ideal scenario for me would be that EVERY frozen embryo is placed into an artificial womb (even the ones with deformities or genetic disorders), that Artificial Wombs make all abortion a thing of the past (unwanted children could be put up for adoption before they are born, the way unwanted children can be put up for adoption after they are born), that pregnancy is never life-threatening (because the child can be placed in a life support system where it can come to term without harming its mother), and that IVF ceases to be used on humans (the influx of extra children will more than meet the adoption demands). If we truly see unborn children as being just as human as born children, then Artificial Wombs are fundamentally no different than a Neonatal intensive care unit (the incubators that keep prematurely born babies alive).
I understand that these will take a lot of shifts in social thinking to occur (for starters people will need to let go of their obsession with gene-relation), but when faced with serious problems I think of them long-term. Bartolome de las Casas must have known that he would not live to see the abolition of slavery, but because he wasn’t willing to settle for merely decreasing slavery he laid the groundworks for others to follow.
