{"id":10087,"date":"2003-09-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-22T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/why-not-artificial-wombs"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:09:21","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:09:21","slug":"why-not-artificial-wombs","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/why-not-artificial-wombs","title":{"rendered":"Why Not Artificial Wombs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n 1924, the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane coined the term \u201cectogenesis\u201d to describe how human pregnancy would one day give way to artificial wombs. \u201cIt was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child,\u201d Haldane wrote, imagining how an earnest college student of the future would describe the phenomenon. \u201cNow that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.\u201d By the year 2074, Haldane imagined, ectogenesis had become a popular technique \u2014 with \u201cless than 30 percent of children… now born of woman.\u201d Writing at a time when debates over contraception and eugenics raged on both sides of the Atlantic, his prediction was an understandable outgrowth of these new efforts to control fertility. \u201cHad it not been for ectogenesis,\u201d Haldane prophesied, \u201cthere can be little doubt that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, we have inched slightly \u2014 but only slightly \u2014 closer to perfecting the technology that would realize Haldane\u2019s vision, albeit for reasons other than the eugenic improvement of the race. A small knot of scientists in the United States and Japan are experimenting with both live animals and human cells to mimic the functioning of the womb. And while their work is in its early stages, it is worth exploring the scientific prospects and ethical implications of research on artificial wombs.<\/p>\n

Haldane\u2019s chosen title \u2014 Daedalus<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 is perhaps telling. In Greek mythology, Daedalus, \u201cthe cunning worker,\u201d was an ingenious practitioner of the mechanical arts, a figure whose inventions proved, at best, ambiguous contributions to humanity. His most famous invention \u2014 wings crafted from bird feathers, wax, and string, built to escape with his son Icarus from the clutches of King Minos \u2014 became the tool of his son\u2019s destruction, when \u201cthe boy, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven.\u201d The hot sun promptly melted the wax wings, Icarus plunged to his death, and Daedalus was left \u201cbitterly lamenting his own arts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haldane chose a very different side of Daedalus to praise in his essay, however. He hailed Daedalus as \u201cthe first modern man,\u201d because \u201che was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods\u201d and not haunted by old taboos. The doomed flight of Icarus was, after all, also a triumph of engineering. The same might be said of artificial wombs. With scientists impatient to extend research on embryos at the earliest stages of life, and researchers at the other end of pregnancy constantly pushing back viability for prematurely-born infants, at some point these two forces will likely meet. If they do, the result will be a new era in human procreation: a world in which children are created in the laboratory, gestated in some artificial womb-like environment, and brought \u201cto term\u201d without ever really being \u201cborn.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n\n

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\r\n\t\tBuilding Better Wombs <\/span>\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

Efforts to mimic nature\u2019s reproductive powers are nothing new. As long ago as the fifteenth century, breeders of Arabian horses practiced crude forms of artificial insemination to ensure the continuation of the best of the breed. Early students of anatomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Andres Vesalius, Nicolaas Hartsoeker, and Marcello Malpighi, examined chicken eggs, animals, and, when they could, the bodies of deceased pregnant women to determine how reproduction and gestation worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Closer to our own time, scientists attempted, with little success, to create artificial wombs for lambs in the 1950s and 1960s. The pursuit of ectogenesis languished, with the exception of sporadic debates in the pages of journals such as Utopian Studies<\/em>, until the 1980s. It was then that researchers in Tokyo began achieving increasingly promising results in their artificial womb experiments with goats. Led by Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University, this work resulted, in 1997, in the announcement that a 17-week-old goat fetus, removed from its mother\u2019s uterus, had survived for three weeks in an artificial womb. The technique, called extrauterine fetal incubation, involved placing the goat fetus in a plastic container of warmed, amniotic-like fluid, where it was supplied with nutrients through a tube inserted in its umbilical cord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, developments in interspecies gestation in animals continue to whittle away at the barriers to reproduction between species, raising the possibility of gestating or partially gestating a human child in a non-human animal uterus. In 2002, researchers at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported the creation of 2,300 hybrid panda-rabbit embryos (produced by inserting panda DNA into enucleated rabbit eggs) and their implantation into rabbit wombs. No pregnancies resulted from this experiment, but later attempts using panda-rabbit clones implanted in cats yielded a pregnancy. In similar experiments, scientists in Spain have produced live ibex kids from ibex embryos implanted and gestated in domestic goats. Researchers at the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis, have been studying interspecies and hybrid pregnancies in sheep and goats. And researchers at Iowa State University have created \u201cinterspecies chimeric calves\u201d in an effort to help preserve certain endangered species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speculation about using such interspecies techniques in humans is already a regular feature of much scientific commentary, at least among the most vigorous enthusiasts and critics of our new reproductive powers. \u201cRather than expending all scientific talent and resources developing artificial wombs,\u201d Reason<\/em> science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote recently, \u201cI suspect that it will be much easier and cheaper to establish pregnancies with human embryos in other mammals, like cows and horses, than it will be to achieve the same thing using artificial uteruses.\u201d This interspecies prospect was recently the subject of discussion by the President\u2019s Council on Bioethics, which is considering recommending a ban on the implantation of human embryos into any non-human animal uterus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research in three other areas may also contribute to the creation of artificial wombs: studies of amniotic fluid and the possibilities of liquid ventilation; efforts to mimic the lining of the womb using human uterine cells and a cocktail of hormones; and the many physicians and scientists involved in the field of neonatology, who are constantly pushing back the boundary of viability in their work with prematurely-born babies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working at the embryonic stages of life, Dr. Hung-Ching Liu of the Weill Medical College at Cornell University has engineered endometrial tissue in the laboratory by taking cells from a woman\u2019s endometrium and prompting them to grow on a biodegradable scaffolding shaped like a human uterus. When Liu introduced an embryo to the artificial uterine lining, it successfully implanted. \u201cThe embryo grows very happily and very healthy,\u201d she noted during the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in 2001. \u201cThe characteristic of this embryo development is very similar to that in vivo.\u201d In these early experiments, she allowed the embryo to grow for six days. But Liu told reporters that, in future experiments, she has every intention of allowing embryos to develop further and longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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View of a human fetus in an artificial womb as part of a Stanford University School of Medicine experiment in 1965. The hand at left adjusts a valve that changes the nutrient levels in the pressurized fluid that feeds oxygen to the fetus via cutaneous respiration.
Fritz Goro\/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Advances in neonatology may also lay the groundwork for the eventual creation of artificial wombs. It is already possible to save a child born during the early part of the second trimester of pregnancy and weighing only two pounds. Research on liquid ventilation, particularly that conducted by Dr. Thomas Schaffer at Temple University, offers hope for treating premature infants by mimicking the fluid found in the lungs in utero. Isolettes \u2014 the technologically sophisticated incubators that fill the neonatal intensive care units of major hospitals \u2014 are, one might say, a cruder version of an artificial womb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question is whether these different avenues of research \u2014 at the beginning of pregnancy and the end of pregnancy \u2014 will one day converge. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to researchers who are doing research on partial ectogenesis \u2014 interventions for premature births, mainly \u2014 and I\u2019ve talked to in vitro fertilization researchers who are trying to extend the period of time an embryo can live outside the womb,\u201d says Scott Gelfand, Director of the Ethics Center at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, who organized a conference on artificial wombs in 2002. \u201cPut the two together and eventually we\u2019re going to be able to do this.\u201d Of course, many scientific and biological hurdles remain, and physicians who work with assisted reproductive technologies are hesitant to predict the future. \u201cThe uterus is a complex organism,\u201d says Dr. David Adamson, Director of Fertility Physicians of Northern California and past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. \u201cThere are still issues related to immunology and cardiovascular development that are extremely complicated and not very well understood. In terms of putting together all of these and having a clinically successful artificial womb,\u201d he says, \u201cmy personal perspective is that it is decades away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The boldest claims come from those who are actually engaged in the research. After his successful artificial womb experiments in goats in 1997, Dr. Kuwabara told reporters, \u201cIf I have the time and money for experiments, maybe within ten years we will have made the move from animal to humans.\u201d Similarly, during an interview at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Conference in 2001, Dr. Liu didn\u2019t exactly demur when asked about the implications of her research. \u201cIs it … science fiction to say maybe in the far future you could have a real breathing embryo and have a child in the laboratory?\u201d the interviewer asked. \u201cThat\u2019s my final goal,\u201d said Dr. Liu. \u201cI call it an artificial uterus. I want to see whether I can develop an actual external device with this endometrium cell and then probably with a computer system simulate the feed in medium, feed out medium… and also have a chip controlling the hormone level.\u201d While conceding that such baby-incubating technology lies in the future, Dr. Liu said, \u201cI believe this can be achieved, we could possibly have an artificial uterus so then you could grow a baby to term.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ethicists, as is their wont, appear willing, if perhaps less able, to make more specific forecasts. Speaking to a New York Times<\/em> reporter in 1996, bioethicist Arthur Caplan thought sixty years was a foreseeable horizon for functional artificial wombs. \u201cIt\u2019s technologically inevitable. Demand is hard to predict, but I\u2019ll say significant.\u201d Asked about the avalanche of moral issues such a technology could pose, Caplan answered cheekily, if a bit chillingly, \u201cthe future is rosy for bioethicists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such speculation is compounded by the wacky contributions of groups such as the clone-happy Raelians, who issued a press release in February 2003 declaring their intention to create an artificial womb called BABYTRON to nurture their future faithful. Also on the fringes, or forefront, depending on one\u2019s sensibility, is China. According to the Far Eastern Review<\/em>, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences have undertaken experiments to implant artificial wombs in men\u2019s abdomens. \u201cPotential male moms are required to conform to the following requirements,\u201d reported China Today<\/em>. \u201cA strong desire to have a child of their own genes and hereditary features; payment of a 200,000 yuan ($24,000) surgery fee; being possessed of a courageous spirit, and trust in science.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how close are we to creating fully functioning artificial wombs, capable of gestating a human child from the embryonic stage to the fetal stage to a state of viability? It would be a mistake to be seduced by the hype. BABYTRON machines and \u201cmotherless births\u201d are not on the immediate horizon. But simply to ignore the prospect \u2014 including the incremental advances being made in this direction at leading academic institutions \u2014 would be short-sighted. And simply to ask the question \u2014 Why not artificial wombs? \u2014 is to consider how far we have gone, at least in principle, toward accepting a world in which mothers become dispensable, and normal childbirth becomes a choice, perhaps even a primitive one.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tThe Meaning of Motherhood <\/span>\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

A<\/span>rtificial wombs are just the kind of technological prospect that radical ethicists love to celebrate. In 1985, philosopher Peter Singer gave them a ringing endorsement: \u201cI think women will be helped, rather than harmed, by the development of a technology that makes it possible for them to have children without being pregnant,\u201d he said. Singer\u2019s vision echoed that of feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone, who made a similar argument in 1970 in The Dialectic of Sex<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Once the \u201cfreeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology\u201d occurred, she said, they could finally reach full equality with men. Viewed this way, artificial wombs are merely another step in the ongoing advance of human reproductive technologies and women\u2019s social equality. They would both expand the range of reproductive choices and make the differences between men and women matters of technological convention rather than biological nature.<\/p>\n

Proponents of artificial wombs also point to what they see as the potential medical benefits of this technology: helping women who have suffered multiple miscarriages due to problems with embryo implantation, or women who have had hysterectomies due to uterine cancer. For women with multiple pregnancies, artificial wombs could provide temporary quarters for one or two fetuses toward the end of gestation, when a woman\u2019s womb becomes more crowded and the risk of complications to herself and her children are greater. And for those unable to carry their own child, artificial wombs would provide an alternative to surrogacy. \u201cThe same concerns about women \u2014 that surrogacy reifies them, that these arrangements take psychological or economic advantage of them \u2014 that whole range of concerns is gone when you talk about artificial wombs,\u201d says Roger B. Dworkin, a professor at Indiana State University School of Law in Bloomington. Other concerns \u2014 such as turning procreation into manufacture or severing the biological connection between mothers and newborns \u2014 are viewed as unlikely. \u201cPresumably babies would be created because someone wanted a baby. To imagine some hideous scenario of millions of babies created artificially for some specific purpose strikes me as unrealistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

But many ethicists are not so sure. \u201cI think artificial wombs could lead to a commodification of the whole process of pregnancy,\u201d says Rosemarie Tong, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a leading scholar in feminist bioethics. \u201cTo the extent that we externalize an experience like pregnancy, it may lead to a view of the growing child as a \u2018thing.\u2019\u201d The further we erode the mystery of the development of human life, the more appealing it becomes to think about improving upon it, or demanding greater control over it. Even given developments in fetal surgery, the human womb still insists that we not breach its protections too often. But with artificial wombs, the transparency of the technology itself would invite greater intervention.<\/p>\n

At stake in this debate is the very meaning of human pregnancy: the meaning of the mother-child relationship, the nature of the female body, and the significance of being born, not \u201cmade.\u201d Let\u2019s say, for example, that scientists perfect the artificial womb to the point where it becomes a \u201chealthier\u201d environment than the old-fashioned human version. Artificial wombs, after all, wouldn\u2019t be threatened by irresponsible introductions of alcohol or illegal drugs. They could have precisely regulated sources of temperature and nutrition and ongoing monitoring by expert technicians in incubation clinics. Like genetic testing of unborn fetuses, which is fast becoming a medical norm rather than a choice, people might begin to ask: Why take the risk of gestating my child in an old-fashioned womb? With an eye to avoiding costs and complications, insurance companies might begin to insist that we don\u2019t. (Imagine \u201cexpectant mothers\u201d stopping by the incubation clinic once a week to check up on their \u201cunborn\u201d child.)<\/p>\n

In the near term, most women would almost certainly gestate their children the old-fashioned way, even if they had the choice. \u201cRelatively few people, with tons of money, who are unusual, would use artificial wombs,\u201d says Tong. But even the option of artificial wombs might change the way we view pregnancy, and perhaps the way we view women. Feminist critics of science, particularly those who embrace an \u201cessentialist\u201d view of women, have long claimed that artificial reproductive technologies threaten women\u2019s social status. Australian sociologist Robyn Rowland has argued that the creation of artificial wombs would spell the end of women\u2019s innate power. \u201cWe may find ourselves without a product of any kind with which to bargain,\u201d she writes. \u201cWe have to ask, if that last power is taken and controlled by men, what role is envisaged for women in the new world? Will women become obsolete?\u201d Rowland and other feminist critics are hardly shrinking violets; they called their 1984 conference on the subject \u201cThe Death of the Female.\u201d They view the medical establishment as irredeemably male \u2014 a monolithic, misogynistic institution that views women who are not pregnant as, literally, idle machines.<\/p>\n

More thoughtful feminist critics note that even without the possibility of manipulation by the medical establishment, artificial wombs would create serious disruptions in our relationships with our children. \u201cIt would weaken the mother-child bond,\u201d says Tong. \u201cIndeed, I think it would weaken the bonds between parents and children in general. On the whole, I think the physicality and embodied nature of pregnancy is a real and material way for one generation to connect to the next… Without that rootedness in the body, relationships between the generations become more abstract, less feeling-filled.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is this prospect \u2014 children without mothers, babies molded in machines \u2014 which chills the blood when reading of children being \u201cdecanted\u201d in Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. How would these gestational foundlings differ from children developed in human wombs? Are there things about the womb that we simply can\u2019t replicate but that might, in fact, be integral to healthy human development? To be \u201cborn of woman\u201d is not merely to be born using a certain technique, a means that is suitable today but perhaps will be superseded in the future by our own ingenuity. This is a point persuasively made by Charles Krauthammer at the October 2003 meeting of the President\u2019s Council on Bioethics:<\/p>\n\n\n

Why do we want the embryo to be housed in its mother? One of the reasons is that it creates an innate connection between the child and the mother, and the mother becomes uniquely protective and attached. That\u2019s human nature. It\u2019s even animal nature as well… And it\u2019s not the mixing or the \u201cyucking\u201d that\u2019s at issue here. It may be severing the connection between the child and the mother, which is a way of protecting that child by giving him a belonginghood to someone who will care. Once you put him in an animal, which is a thing for these purposes, or a machine, which might happen in the future, you create a completely atomized and defenseless creature, and that opens the way to all kinds of tyrannies, social control, and lack of autonomy, which we would not want.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Even Haldane obliquely acknowledged the reality of this mother-child bond, when he predicted, in Daedalus<\/em>, that despite the widespread use of ectogenesis, women would be injected with a hormone to prompt lactation so that they could still breastfeed their artificially-gestated children.<\/p>\n

To be sure, motherhood has already changed significantly due to scientific and social developments. We rightly praise motherhood without biological links in the case of adoption, and we largely accept motherhood with biological links but without pregnancy in the case of surrogacy. Single-motherhood is also increasing, mostly because of divorce, but also because of single women using artificial insemination. In this context, artificial wombs could be viewed as simply a continuation and expansion of the new idea of the family. It enshrines technologically a current cultural reality: the erosion of the belief that mothers and fathers are unique and thus different, not interchangeable.<\/p>\n\n

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\r\n\t\tLife After Birth \t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

P<\/span>erhaps it is premature to consider the ethical implications of artificial wombs, with the technology for achieving them likely far off in the future. And yet, the prospect of ectogenesis raises questions of more immediate significance, and thinking about this future prospect compels us to examine (or re-examine) some current practices. \u201cIf reproduction is at once completely separated from sexual love,\u201d Haldane wrote, \u201cmankind will be free in an altogether new sense.\u201d But free to do what? In just the last few years, we\u2019ve used this freedom to create mixed-sex, \u201cshe-male\u201d embryos. We\u2019ve harvested the undeveloped ovaries of aborted fetuses, and thus opened the door to producing children with aborted fetuses as biological mothers. We\u2019ve produced female oocytes from male-derived embryonic stem cells, and thus laid the groundwork for single-sex procreation. In this context, ectogenesis seems more like a culmination of present trends than a radical departure; it seems like yet another sign, or signpost, of our inability to accept limits on the use of reproductive technologies.<\/p>\n

In Brave New World Revisited<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Aldous Huxley noted that a narrow-minded focus on order and control \u201ccan make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clean up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.\u201d The point of Huxley\u2019s original tale, after all, was to remind us of the human impulse not merely to mimic nature, but to improve upon it. His hatchery moved \u201cout of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human intervention.\u201d The inexorable desire to update, improve, and perfect, he warned, can have unforeseen consequences.<\/p>\n

In this spirit, perhaps we shouldn\u2019t treat the human womb like just another organ to be replicated and improved upon. When a Seattle dentist named Barney Clark received the first artificial human heart in 1982, concerns about how artificial organs might change us were largely lost in the avalanche of praise for this inspiring technical advance. Like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, Clark had finally received a heart (which, sadly, allowed him to survive for only 112 days before his body rejected the device and he died). This feel-good narrative even came complete with an Oz-like figure, Dr. Willem Kolff, a Dutch-born scientist who invented the first kidney dialysis machine (an external artificial kidney, if you will), who helped design that first artificial heart, and who is currently hard at work creating an artificial lung.<\/p>\n

The idea of Dorothy clicking her heels three times and wishing for an artificial womb is somehow more unsettling; the metaphor fails. Why? Perhaps some things are so ineffable that they shouldn\u2019t be artificially reproduced. When synthesized music hit the airwaves in the 1970s, its promoters claimed that now, in the privacy of your own home and for the price of a tiny electronic keyboard, the sounds of the New York Philharmonic would be at your fingertips \u2014 to be made, not just listened to. The machine promised perfect imitations of the pitch, timbre, and volume of the original instruments. But as is all too evident if you turn on the radio, synthesized music was used most effectively by pop musicians who preferred the electronic mimic of forty violins to the real thing, and by \u201csynthesized music composers\u201d who produce crimes against symphonies with titles such as \u201cRomantique Fantastique.\u201d This is a far cry from the elevated predictions of synthesized music\u2019s early devotees, including men such as Milton Babbitt, who waxed enthusiastic about \u201cthe notion of having complete control over one\u2019s composition, of being complete master of all you survey… to hear one\u2019s music as it was conceived.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, synthesized music is hardly the same thing as an artificial womb. But the parallel is at least suggestive. In both cases, it is not the product alone that matters, precisely because the end we seek (music, children) is more than just a product. The process of creation \u2014 the living birth and the live musician \u2014 actually matters. Even the phrase \u201cartificial womb\u201d appears at odds with itself: \u201cartificial\u201d conjures images of chemical sweeteners, synthetic fabrics, second-best imitations, while \u201cwomb\u201d still retains its mystery and its gravity.<\/p>\n

Artificial wombs spur us, like Icarus, to test the extreme and more dangerous limits of our technical powers. \u201cMaybe we are not yet ready to use this technology in a responsible way,\u201d says Gelfand. \u201cIf you don\u2019t give a child matches, he won\u2019t start a fire.\u201d Eighty years earlier, Haldane offered a similar metaphor: \u201cMan armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.\u201d Although billed as yet another future reproductive option, artificial wombs have the potential to change us in ways still difficult to fully imagine. Haldane argued that science held possibilities if \u201cmankind can adjust its morality to its powers.\u201d But why should our powers remake our morality? And why do we fashion ourselves wise enough to begin a new era in human life \u2014 \u201clife after birth\u201d \u2014 without wreaking great havoc? Of course, the greatest tragedy may be the very lack of havoc: A society of situational moralists, their morality adjusted to suit their powers, might be happier, healthier, and less troubled by ethical dilemmas. But it would not be human in the same way it once was.<\/p>\n\n

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\r\n\t\tThe Mystery of the Womb\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

T<\/span>here has always been an incalculable mystery surrounding the womb, as religion and folk wisdom attest. \u201cAs thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all,\u201d says Ecclesiastes. In the Hebrew Bible, interventions in the womb were considered to be solely the province of God, not man. In the story of Rachel and Jacob, when the barren Rachel says, \u201cGive me children, or else I die,\u201d Jacob responds in anger, saying \u201cAm I in God\u2019s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?\u201d For centuries, folk tales warned pregnant women against walking in graveyards, looking at deformed people, witnessing a solar eclipse, or even strolling around after dark, lest they damage the developing child.<\/p>\n

Our feelings of awe and curiosity about the womb are a reaction both to its physiological function and its potent status as a symbol of fertility, procreation, and the continuation of the species. It is not quite an organ, although it can be donated and transplanted; and it is more mysterious than the heart or the lungs, which both men and women share. It is freighted with meaning because it is the site, or the potential site, of such a fundamental and in many ways still deeply mysterious thing \u2014 the emergence and development of a new human life.<\/p>\n

In an essay written just before he died, the philosopher Hans Jonas observed that \u201cnatality,\u201d as he called it, \u201cis as essential an attribute of the human condition as is mortality. It denotes the fact that we all have been born, which means that each of us had a beginning when others already had long been there, and it ensures that there will always be such that see the world for the first time, see things with new eyes, wonder where others are dulled by habit, start out from where they had arrived.\u201d In the end, artificial wombs are different from current technologies like IVF and modern arrangements like surrogacy, because they represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body. There is something about being born of a human being \u2014 rather than a cow or an incubator \u2014 that fundamentally makes us human. Whether it is the sound of a human voice, the beating of a human heart, the temperature and rhythms of the human body, or some combination of all of these things that makes it so, it is difficult to imagine that science will ever find a way to truly mimic them. We should remember this truth as we expand the reach of our powers over the very origins of human life, lest we give birth to a technology we will live to regret.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christine Rosen on the meaning of being born, not incubated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16040,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[2266,2291,5011,5014],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10087"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10087"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10087"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}