What Do Artificial Wombs Mean for Women?
By Soraya Chemaly,
RH Reality Check
| 02. 23. 2012
What happens when women, like men, can be parents without bearing children? Does one form of gestation become a status symbol? Another a stigma? Who decides which gestation environment is healthier or more economical? You? Your gamete-partner? Your priest? Your employer? Your insurance company? If we think we have a complicated debate now, just wait. The current War on Women pales in comparison to the potential impact that ectogenesis, a technology in which a human fetus gestates completely out of a mother’s body, will have. It is, in its ultimate manifestation, qualitatively different from birth control or other assisted reproductive technologies. This change has the power to alter, in unprecedented ways, the interests, rights and responsibilities of women, men and the state.
J.B.S. Haldane, a British scientist, who predicted that by 2074 live human births would make up less than 30 percent of all births, first coined the term ectogenesis in 1924. His prediction was ambitious, but not unrealistic. Despite the sci-fi horrors evoked by “artificial wombs,” this isn’t the stuff of dark dystopias. It is a partially realized...
Related Articles
By Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan, CBC | 04.09.2024
A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out the real dads — and left a trail of shattered lives around the globe, a CBC News investigation has found...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...