Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” we read in the Bible. Yet this well-known verse, a favorite of many pro-lifers, may have to be amended in future editions of the Good Book to specify whether God meant a natural womb or an “artificial” one.
Yes, science—that two-faced, amoral fixture of modern life—is back, and it brings “artificial wombs.” According to a report in Britain’s Guardian Unlimited, Hung-Ching Liu of Cornell University’s Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility has succeeded in taking cells from the lining of a natural womb and growing them on a biodegradable “scaffold” shaped like a woman’s uterus.
“Then the good doctor implants an embryo left over from a prior in vitro fertilization (IVF) program, which embryo then cheerfully implants itself in those cells and begins to settle in to its new home,” writes syndicated columnist Tony Blankley. Her test ran only six days this time out, but Dr. Liu plans to go for 14 days next time. After that, she predicts, working “artificial wombs” will become reality “in a few years.”
And beyond that? Technology expert Jeremy Rifkin, author of such books as The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World and many newspaper articles, recently noted that we’ll likely see “the mass use of artificial wombs by the time today’s babies become parents.” Bart Kosko, author of Heaven in a Chip and an electrical engineer at the University of Southern California, predicts that “the artificial wombs of the future will grow children in a vat from unique gene patterns that parents pick.”
Health-insurance companies would likely prefer the presumed safety of artificial wombs, says Scott Gelfand, organizer of “The End of Natural Motherhood,” an international conference held recently at Oklahoma State University. “Natural pregnancy and childbirth may become a luxury available primarily to the leisured classes,” writes Blankley.
We haven’t heard nearly as much in the media about this great leap as we have about cloning, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less troubling, morally speaking. Start with the fact that it involves IVF—conception in a petri dish—which is virtually impossible to accomplish without resorting to behavior that is gravely sinful, such as masturbation and “selective reduction” (i.e., murder) of any “extra” children who are conceived.
Synthetic wombs also continue the process Pope Paul VI warned the world about years ago: separating the sexual act from the conception of children. Instead of an act in which two people give themselves totally to one another, as the Catechism notes, we give technology power over life and death—power it was never intended to have. “Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children,” the Catechism says.
Believe it or not, the man who invented the birth control pill, Carl Djerassi, expresses some reservations about artificial wombs in his book, This Man’s Pill. Having sex without children—his special contribution to today’s moral sewer—is one thing. But children without sex? Hmm, there could be some long-term consequence to that one. He doesn’t know the half of it.
Feminists, interestingly enough, seem divided over the value of artificial wombs. Writing in Britain’s Daily Mail, Mary Kenny (who says she considered it “pathetic” that her mother left to get married and assume the “burdens of family life”) ties “women’s liberation” to them. American feminist Shulamith Firestone believed women would never be truly free until children were conceived in the lab and implanted in “hired or artificial wombs.”
But other feminists worry that “artificial wombs” are just another way for men to exert control over women’s bodies. Suddenly the abortion option wouldn’t be their exclusive province any more. “The father could at any time flip the abort switch just as easily as the mother could,” says Bart Kosko.
And some notice how technology is making Roe vs. Wade look shaky. After all, it draws the line for abortion at unborn children capable of living outside the womb. Thanks in part to advances in fetal surgery, the age of viability is shrinking almost daily.
“Some people will see the artificial womb as the final triumph of modern science,” writes Rifkin. “Others, the ultimate human folly.” The triumph of folly is more like it.
(This article courtesy of HLI Reports, a publication of Human Life International.)
