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Notes -
You genuinely think that applying the model from plato's republic of separating production of children from the family unit would have good outcomes?
Artificial wombs as a tool to let couples have kids without the women have to deal with childbirth is one thing. But you think that creating a generation of children largely raised by the government without a family would be a good way to combat birth rate decline? Being raised by a mother and father, or at least paired parents, is pretty important for children. And my assumption would be that having a single committed parent tends to have better outcomes than being an orphan who is never adopted and makes it to 18 purely raised by government institutions.
Even within the bounds of a question that is an "if you were the all powerful sovereign" style question - I still have a hard time believing you think that would be a good idea.
I suppose I am predisposed to disagree, because if you succeeded in creating a protocol to raise children via institutions successfully, that would remove the family as a core unit of society, which to me appears to be the exact opposite of what should be our goal. I think that should be elevated as the core unit and the relevance of individuals should be decreased.
But even beyond that, the idea that you could achieve success with such a system seems totally wild. You're talking about implementing a system that, based on all existing stats would be a total disaster, and then trying to scale that to make it more optimal than normal family rearing. What makes you think that can be done? It's total utopian thinking.
I'm down to experiment with it if the goal is increasing birth rates. If it works out, great. If it doesn't work out, then close the program and back to the drawing board. Trying artificial wombs with conventional parents and making up for shortfalls with kids from donor stock avoids damaging women's rights and autonomy, undermining of secularism, punishing people for their intimate relationship choices, or that business about increasing teen pregnancy seen in other proposed solutions so far.
Calling things utopian doesn't dissuade me much. Many technologies, rights and ways of life accepted as normal in the present were once considered utopian; it is a process of people laying out ideas before they can be implemented that allows for efforts to develop that can bring about their implementation. Humans aren't even being cloned yet*, it's way too early to write off the idea of using vat grown people to make up for manpower shortages.
*As far as we know. Given that barriers are mostly regulatory rather than technological, I would not be too surprised if someone out there with a lot of wealth and expertise in a country with little oversight is already raising a clone.
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