I had a thought a while back.
We already have the ability to record an entire strand of DNA into a computer file. At around 1.5Gb, it's a large but not unmanageable file size. We also have gene printers, capable of producing DNA strands from file.
If we determine that a fetus has not acquired meaningful experience (and it can't, until it has a complex brain), then the only feature of it that is meaningfully human is the future potential it has to become one. In my experience, it is that potential that anti-abortion campaigners see as worthy of protection.
I propose that abortion be fully legalized and access to it provided around the country, with the addition of the storage of genetic code as a digital file. Stored potential humans would be provided to interested couples around the nation.
An interesting side effect of this is that because the DNA is still on file, in the case of a miscarriage it could simply be duplicated and retried, allowing for an (eventual) 100% success rate, far superior to normal conception rates.
Finally, a way to preserve bodily autonomy and the rights of potential humans.
Oh, that reminds me, potential future humans will want to have a nice environment to live in, and would do well to have medical care (pre- and post-natal). Pro-life arguments can now turn to forcing the government to protect these other rights of the unborn.
Well, no, because none of that works at all the way you think it does.
For one thing, reading lengthy strands of DNA is neither cheap nor error-free; all of the really affordable ways to sequence DNA, like Sanger sequencing, strain to go much farther than a kilobase per read. What you get from next-gen sequencing -- and bear in mind, these processes are expensive even in a research context, let alone a medical one -- is not a single genome-length read, but rather a whole series of short reads of varying depth which must be reassembled computationally. There are regions where that process works ambiguously and more than a few where it generally fails outright unless still more expensive measures are taken, and even then there's still a reasonable objection that the genome is almost certainly not correct. But okay, say you get your file and persuade yourself/wish it's accurate.
Now, "gene printers" do not meaningfully exist as a distinct technology except in the minds of excitable amateurs; what we actually have, including in what you have read about called "gene printers" in garbage popsci articles, are ever more high-throughput means of doing variations on the same oligonucleotide syntheses we always have, and that is error-prone even at lengths of only a few hundred bases. Nobody even tries to go beyond about 2.5 kb. So, okay, let's run 1.2 million reactions in parallel at a total cost of some $21 million per fetus even assuming a tenfold reduction in cost per base because magical thinking about scaling. Now we have to put them together. Remember the assembly problem from above? Let's do that at the bench with an even higher cost in time and reagents for failure and the added risk of misannealing and complicated secondary structure! Sounds great; you're welcome to try. With someone else's thermal cycler, to be clear.
But okay. Say we get this cobbled-together Frankenstein genome together. How exactly do you intend to put it into a zygote? CRISPR and cre/lox and flp/frt can't do it, and somatic cell nuclear transfer is expensive and failure prone -- and remember, we've not a lot of DNA to spare, we can't replicate it easily, and it's terribly nicked if it even packages at all (which we only kind of speculatively know how to do.) But let's keep going; if mere impossibility stopped us we'd have given up long ago. Now we have, at last, a cell with a genome in it. It may not be the genome we want, of course, because every process in this is error-prone, and these errors might well give rise to a viable fetus that is a whole new problem, albeit one far more likely to die because SCNT kind of does that a lot. But let's go farther and say we luck out and get exactly the genome we want.
It's still missing all the methyl marks and histone acetylations and literally every epigenetic mark it's supposed to have, so the abortion crusaders are free to say we've lost information and potential and wasted millions of dollars per baby for nothing. Congratulations.
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