Despite recent progress, artificial wombs still face technical challenges. De-extinction efforts, of all things, are driving it forward. Just how much is anyone’s guess.
This is a monumentally bad idea. The end goal is the creation of a human, and that has massive long-term social and ethical implications
- The idea that the contents of the umbilical cord is the sole factor in viability is pathetic and comical. It may be adequate for creating a biologically intact organism, but the “host” mother provides much more than liquid.
- Many adult pathologies stem from attachment failures. Building that in is insanity.
- The Supreme Court has supported property rights to genomes. One could easily harvest an egg and “corporatize” it through the process of gestation in a bag, resulting in corporate ownership of the “end product”
- Read Huxley
- The antinatal argument is not illogical - that life is largely miserable, that the fetus did not consent to birth, and therefore conception is unethical. I don’t subscribe to it, but I would if gestation became divorced from any decision by a parent. If a medical group could take an egg and create a person without the nominal participation of another consenting human, that would be 100% unethical.
- The last control we have in society is control over reproduction. We can deprive the capital system of labor. If babies can be created on demand by capital, it will result in a labor hellscape.
The main problem with your critique is that it falls into the same tired old tropes about “test tube babies” or “designer babies”. Artificial wombs will assuredly need more development to mimic the complex cocktail of immunology and hormones present in the natural womb, but that is a solvable problem, not some formless or unknowable barrier. As for the rest, you treat any babies born of an artificial womb as an “other” when they are obviously no different from a human born in a natural way.
- Children orphaned or without attachment now have bad outcomes. The solution is parenting and close contact, not banning artificial wombs.
- Corporate ownership of “the end product” is slavery, which is already illegal. You cannot own another person’s genome.
- Huxley’s book relies on genetic modification that would only be possible after significant advances in the technique, and again has no bearing on the actual use of an artificial womb given that Huxley’s society requires active buy in from policymakers and voters to implement.
- A medical student could theoretically already create a child from IVF in the same way, just using a surrogate instead of an artificial womb. Yet this does not happen and is not a pressing ethical concern for society.
- Creating babies to act as labor is just slavery with extra steps and is already illegal. If you have issues with relations between Capital and Labor, the solution should be policymaking, not the threat of human extinction by cessation of reproduction, and given that Capital is also made up of humans, it doesn’t seem to be a good faith argument for an actual issue with artificial wombs.
Thank you for taking the time to make such a thoughtful response!
“Tired tropes” is a little strong, and I only say so because I think there are forces that could make some of your counterclaims likely more dated.
I can separate the issues into two main concerns:
1. Reductive “machine” science ignores complexity
2. Society would never allow companies to propagate the species
It is becoming increasingly clear that reductive science, your “precise chemical cocktail” reflects outmoded thinking. Yes, we likely could figure out the mix of proteins and other organic chemicals, and perhaps even synthesize them in time. Perhaps we will lock down the mechanical environment, including “delivery.”
The issue is that the making of a new human is an astoundingly complex system, and mechanical reproductions of these systems will always fail. These systems were never designed, so they don’t follow machine logic or assembly.
What role does the heartbeat of the mother play? Her hormones? The temperature? Movement? Is there information passed from her nervous system? It is not that we cannot research each, it is that the simulation will always be a machine and therefore a coarse-grained “compromise” that would almost by definition have just emotional and psychological issues.
The problem of poor attachment could be argued as one of the top problems of society, not something that can be waved away by saying “parenting and close contact.” It would not be unreasonable to claim that a huge portion of “evil” in world society comes from “poor parenting” and I would put Trump, Musk, Putin and Gates as just my first examples. Attachment isn’t a few hugs after birth. It almost certainly starts during gestation and is a continuation of the experience of gestation.
The fact that the article simply ignores this is part of the problem.
The second issue is more disheartening. We have a few items to consider:
1. Birth rates are tumbling worldwide, and it is not because we can’t gestate children in a box. People don’t want to have children.
2. Capital and authority have already begun rumbling about how to solve this, and some countries will resort to forced procreation in the name of survival. The only thing stopping this is that humans need to carry babies. Removing this impediment will lead to authorities attempting to grow population “inorganically”
3. The HeLa gene line, the end of the chevron case and Monsanto’s roundup ready gene sequences and gleaning already show us that where there is a will there is a Supreme Court. If propagation is viewed as essential for national competitiveness, all of the precious protections you imagine will fall. One need only look at the abysmal policy failure around AI.
4. Some of the most powerful people in the world are espousing pronatalism as essential to economic growth. Try to list how many cases where societal concerns have been thoughtfully met when the most powerful people found them contrary to economic prosperity.
I really do understand and support your claims, and god I hope they are right. However I think faith in reductive, mechanical approaches to complex systems will inevitably cause chaos, and that we are nowhere near smart enough as a species to handle it.
After what we've seen with slavery, mass fraud, the military industrial complex, the healthcare and food industrial complex, the media industrial complex, social media, data surveillance, and most recently generative AI, I have precisely zero faith that political and corporate "leaders" will do right by society in this case. Or that society in general will be able to handle it.
Thank you Matt for your thoughtful notes. As a mom who has gone through a fair amount of challenges before I had my daughter, I can personally attest to the powerful connection between a mother and her child in utero. No artificial womb can replicate that.
And let's not forget that vaginal birth has additional benefits for the baby's immune system and gut bacteria. No matter how brilliant technology might be, it works best when it supports Mama Nature instead of trying to replace her.
I wonder what sort of implications the existence of artificial wombs would have on the abortion debate. A lot of the standards for regulating abortion have to do with viability, with 24 weeks being the arbitrary cutoff set in the early 70’s and more recent medical technology pushing the actual viability date a few weeks earlier.
Imagine if there were artificial wombs that were functional all the way down to conception, or close to it. In the same way almost no one would support abortions a day before birth, I wonder what people’s opinions would be if it were viable to keep a fetus alive at basically any point.
Maybe it would create far more division, as pro-choice people dig in, or maybe it would solve the issue, as abortion is replaced by transplantation to an artificial womb.
This is a monumentally bad idea. The end goal is the creation of a human, and that has massive long-term social and ethical implications
- The idea that the contents of the umbilical cord is the sole factor in viability is pathetic and comical. It may be adequate for creating a biologically intact organism, but the “host” mother provides much more than liquid.
- Many adult pathologies stem from attachment failures. Building that in is insanity.
- The Supreme Court has supported property rights to genomes. One could easily harvest an egg and “corporatize” it through the process of gestation in a bag, resulting in corporate ownership of the “end product”
- Read Huxley
- The antinatal argument is not illogical - that life is largely miserable, that the fetus did not consent to birth, and therefore conception is unethical. I don’t subscribe to it, but I would if gestation became divorced from any decision by a parent. If a medical group could take an egg and create a person without the nominal participation of another consenting human, that would be 100% unethical.
- The last control we have in society is control over reproduction. We can deprive the capital system of labor. If babies can be created on demand by capital, it will result in a labor hellscape.
Again. Bad idea
The main problem with your critique is that it falls into the same tired old tropes about “test tube babies” or “designer babies”. Artificial wombs will assuredly need more development to mimic the complex cocktail of immunology and hormones present in the natural womb, but that is a solvable problem, not some formless or unknowable barrier. As for the rest, you treat any babies born of an artificial womb as an “other” when they are obviously no different from a human born in a natural way.
- Children orphaned or without attachment now have bad outcomes. The solution is parenting and close contact, not banning artificial wombs.
- Corporate ownership of “the end product” is slavery, which is already illegal. You cannot own another person’s genome.
- Huxley’s book relies on genetic modification that would only be possible after significant advances in the technique, and again has no bearing on the actual use of an artificial womb given that Huxley’s society requires active buy in from policymakers and voters to implement.
- A medical student could theoretically already create a child from IVF in the same way, just using a surrogate instead of an artificial womb. Yet this does not happen and is not a pressing ethical concern for society.
- Creating babies to act as labor is just slavery with extra steps and is already illegal. If you have issues with relations between Capital and Labor, the solution should be policymaking, not the threat of human extinction by cessation of reproduction, and given that Capital is also made up of humans, it doesn’t seem to be a good faith argument for an actual issue with artificial wombs.
Thank you for taking the time to make such a thoughtful response!
“Tired tropes” is a little strong, and I only say so because I think there are forces that could make some of your counterclaims likely more dated.
I can separate the issues into two main concerns:
1. Reductive “machine” science ignores complexity
2. Society would never allow companies to propagate the species
It is becoming increasingly clear that reductive science, your “precise chemical cocktail” reflects outmoded thinking. Yes, we likely could figure out the mix of proteins and other organic chemicals, and perhaps even synthesize them in time. Perhaps we will lock down the mechanical environment, including “delivery.”
The issue is that the making of a new human is an astoundingly complex system, and mechanical reproductions of these systems will always fail. These systems were never designed, so they don’t follow machine logic or assembly.
What role does the heartbeat of the mother play? Her hormones? The temperature? Movement? Is there information passed from her nervous system? It is not that we cannot research each, it is that the simulation will always be a machine and therefore a coarse-grained “compromise” that would almost by definition have just emotional and psychological issues.
The problem of poor attachment could be argued as one of the top problems of society, not something that can be waved away by saying “parenting and close contact.” It would not be unreasonable to claim that a huge portion of “evil” in world society comes from “poor parenting” and I would put Trump, Musk, Putin and Gates as just my first examples. Attachment isn’t a few hugs after birth. It almost certainly starts during gestation and is a continuation of the experience of gestation.
The fact that the article simply ignores this is part of the problem.
The second issue is more disheartening. We have a few items to consider:
1. Birth rates are tumbling worldwide, and it is not because we can’t gestate children in a box. People don’t want to have children.
2. Capital and authority have already begun rumbling about how to solve this, and some countries will resort to forced procreation in the name of survival. The only thing stopping this is that humans need to carry babies. Removing this impediment will lead to authorities attempting to grow population “inorganically”
3. The HeLa gene line, the end of the chevron case and Monsanto’s roundup ready gene sequences and gleaning already show us that where there is a will there is a Supreme Court. If propagation is viewed as essential for national competitiveness, all of the precious protections you imagine will fall. One need only look at the abysmal policy failure around AI.
4. Some of the most powerful people in the world are espousing pronatalism as essential to economic growth. Try to list how many cases where societal concerns have been thoughtfully met when the most powerful people found them contrary to economic prosperity.
I really do understand and support your claims, and god I hope they are right. However I think faith in reductive, mechanical approaches to complex systems will inevitably cause chaos, and that we are nowhere near smart enough as a species to handle it.
After what we've seen with slavery, mass fraud, the military industrial complex, the healthcare and food industrial complex, the media industrial complex, social media, data surveillance, and most recently generative AI, I have precisely zero faith that political and corporate "leaders" will do right by society in this case. Or that society in general will be able to handle it.
Thank you Matt for your thoughtful notes. As a mom who has gone through a fair amount of challenges before I had my daughter, I can personally attest to the powerful connection between a mother and her child in utero. No artificial womb can replicate that.
And let's not forget that vaginal birth has additional benefits for the baby's immune system and gut bacteria. No matter how brilliant technology might be, it works best when it supports Mama Nature instead of trying to replace her.
I wonder what sort of implications the existence of artificial wombs would have on the abortion debate. A lot of the standards for regulating abortion have to do with viability, with 24 weeks being the arbitrary cutoff set in the early 70’s and more recent medical technology pushing the actual viability date a few weeks earlier.
Imagine if there were artificial wombs that were functional all the way down to conception, or close to it. In the same way almost no one would support abortions a day before birth, I wonder what people’s opinions would be if it were viable to keep a fetus alive at basically any point.
Maybe it would create far more division, as pro-choice people dig in, or maybe it would solve the issue, as abortion is replaced by transplantation to an artificial womb.