http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2 ... ss-births/
And secondly, I came across an article commemorating the death of Shulamith Firestone, a feminist author from the 70s who advocated for this technology as a means of eliminating what she believed to be the root cause of misogyny (as radical feminists are wont to do), with said root cause being the burden of childbirth. I hadn't heard of Firestone before this, but I found her ideas to be thought provoking and relevant to the subject.Scientifically, it’s called ectogenesis, a term coined by J.B.S. Haldane in 1924. A hugely influential science popularizer, Haldane did for his generation what Carl Sagan did later in the century. He got people thinking and talking about the implications of science and technology on our civilization, and did not shy away from inventing new words in order to do so. Describing ectogenesis as pregnancy occurring in an artificial environment, from fertilization to birth, Haldane predicted that by 2074 this would account for more than 70 percent of human births.
His prediction may yet be on target.
In discussing the idea in his work Daedalus–a reference to the inventor in Greek mythology who, through his inventions, strived to bring humans to the level of the gods–Haldane was diving into issues of his time, namely eugenics and the first widespread debates over contraception and population control.
Whether Haldane’s view will prove correct about the specific timing of when ectogenesis might become popular, or the numbers of children born that way, it’s certain that he was correct that tAt the same time, he was right that the societal implications are sure to be significant as the age of motherless birth approaches. They will not be the same societal implications that were highlighted in Daedalus, however.
Technology developing in increments
Where are we on the road to ectogenesis right now? To begin, progress has definitely been rapid over the last 20-30 years. In the mid 1990s, Japanese investigators succeeded in maintaining goat fetuses for weeks in a machine containing artificial amniotic fluid. At the same time, the recent decades have seen rapid advancement in neonatal intensive care that is pushing back the minimum gestational age from which human fetuses can be kept alive. Today, it is possible for a preterm fetus to survive when removed from the mother at a gestational age of slightly less than 22 weeks. That’s only a little more than halfway through the pregnancy (normally 40 weeks). And while rescuing an infant delivered at such an early point requires sophisticated, expensive equipment and care, the capability continues to increase.
A comprehensive review published by the New York Academy of Sciences three years ago highlights a series of achievements by various research groups using ex vivo (out of the body) uterus environments to support mammalian fetuses early in pregnancy. Essentially, two areas of biotechnology are developing rapidly that potentially can enable ectogenesis in humans, and, along the way, what the authors of the Academy review call partial ectogenesis.
Because a fetus develops substantially with respect to external form and internal organs during the second half of pregnancy, our current capability to deliver and maintain preterm infants actually is a kind of partial ectogenesis. Supported by all of the equipment in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a premature infant continues its development as a normal fetus of the same gestational age would do inside the mother’s uterus, but with one important exception. Inside the womb, oxygenated, nourished blood comes in, and blood carrying waste goes out, through the placenta and umbilical cord. Once delivered, however, a preemie must breathe through its lungs, cleanse the blood with its liver and kidneys, and get nutrition through its gastrointestinal tract.
But because these organ systems, especially the lungs, are not really ready to do their job so early, there is a limit to how early a developing fetus can be transferred from womb to NICU. Known as viability, the limit definitely has been pushed back with special treatments given to the mother prior to delivery and, just after birth, directly into the preemie’s lungs, and with intensive support. But the 22 week gestational age may be around the absolute limit for survival for a fetus that will have to depend on lung-breathing, not to mention other organs, rather than its mother’s nourished blood.
Still, the capability to push back the limit is around the corner. One of the two developing key technologies is the artificial amniotic fluid filled environment that has continued to develop with laboratory animal models since the work with goats in the 1990s. The other area is embryo transfer. Not only can a developing mammal be transferred from the uterus of its own mother to that of a surrogate, but gradually investigators are reproducing the endometrium–the cell layer of the uterus that contains and nourishes the pregnancy–as a cell culture, or an in vitro model. The convergence of these technologies will make it possible to transfer a developing human into a system that includes the placenta and umbilical cord and supplies all consumables (oxygen and food), and removes all waste, directly through the blood.
Thus, survival and continuing development would not depend on the lungs and other organs being ready yet to do their job. Applying such a system to fetus delivered in the middle of pregnancy would constitute real partial ectogenesis. Furthermore, since bypassing the developing, not fully functional organs, stands to improve survival substantially, and might even decrease the costs of extreme premature birth, the movement of the technology from research to clinic is inevitable.
Once that happens, there will be no obstacle against pushing the limit further, toward full ectogenesis. But there will be no obstacle to pushing the limit akin to how lung viability has placed an obstacle to conventional pre-term care. At some point, an in vitro fertilized egg could be planted directly into the artificial womb, with no need for a natural uterus even for the early stages.
Societal implications
An artificial womb may sound futuristic, and in Haldane’s time this may have supported a perception that realizing the technology would go together with controlling the birth rate and eugenics controlling which humans come to life, and thus which genetic traits get passed down to future populations. But today, we could do these things without ectogenesis. We have plenty of contraceptive methods and can sterilize people, or make them more fertile, while pregnancies can be induced with implanted embryos made with in vitro fertilization.
If anyone is working on a eugenics program at present, they can use surrogate mothers and don’t really require an artificial uterus–unless, we imagine a society that routinely, forcefully sterilizes all females, so that whoever has the artificial uterus has a monopoly on reproduction, ectogenesis does not relate particularly to those 1920s issues. Instead, the artificial uterus would simply move the pregnancy outside of the woman’s body. When considering societal consequences, that’s the main factor that we need to keep in mind, and doing so we see that it does relate to many currently controversial issues.
Considering abortion, for instance, while the proposition that a fetus, even an embryo, is a person with a “right to life” is a religious belief that cannot be imposed on everyone else, the main argument for the right to choose is a woman’s right to control her body. If a developing embryo or fetus is not viable and the mother wants it out of her uterus, that’s her right.
But what happens once we have the technology to remove it from her without killing it and let the pregnancy continue in an artificial womb? Already, with NICU technology pushing back the survival limit, the timing of viability affecting the legality of abortion, has been challenged by abortion foes. The prospect of ectogenesis stands to turn the viability issue on its face, and it will be interesting to see where that leads.
While social conservatives might be receptive about what an artificial uterus might do to the abortion paradigm, make no mistake they’d probably not be happy that the technology also stands to make it much easier for male gay couples to have babies. All they’d need is an egg donor; no more need for a surrogate mother to take the embryo into her uterus and carry it for 40 weeks. That’s easier for any gay couple in terms of practicality, waiting periods, and money. The same thing goes for a transgender person wishing to have a child.
Finally, because of the sheer numbers, the artificial uterus could have major implications for heterosexual women with fully functional uteri. Many who want children of their own might prefer to forego pregnancy yet would hesitate to hire a human surrogate. Not only is it expensive, but the surrogate could grow fond of the fetus she’s carrying, so why bother taking the risk?
On the other hand, the mind set could be quite different if the surrogate were a high tech jar. It’s your baby with no worries about competing mothers. I’m not suggesting that all potential mothers would opt for this, but Haldane’s guess might not be so unrealistic in that it might end up being a substantial fraction of the population.
http://io9.com/5939856/rip-futurist-shu ... liberation
Shulamith Firestone, author of the highly influential The Dialectic of Sex, has died at the age of 67. A major figure in the development of cyberfeminism, Firestone will be remembered for her promotion of artificial wombs and other reproductive technologies as a means for women to liberate themselves from biological impositions and patriarchal oppression. She died on August 28 in her Manhattan apartment of natural causes.
Born in Ottawa on January 7, 1945, Firestone was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in St. Louis, Missouri. During the 1960s she studied fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and moved to New York City in 1967 where she co-founded New York Radical Women, the Redstockings group, and New York Radical Feminists.
In 1970, at the age of 25, Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution — a book that effectively kickstarted the cyberfeminist movement, influencing later thinkers like Joanna Russ (author of "The Female Man"), sci-fi author Joan Slonczweski, and of course, Donna "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" Harraway, author of "The Cyborg Manifesto." To come up with her unique feminist philosophy, Firestone took 19th and 20th century socialist thinking and fused it with Freudian psychoanalysis and the existentialist perspectives of Simone de Beauvoir.
Essentially, Firestone argued that gender inequality was the result of a patriarchal social structure that had been imposed upon women on account of their necessary role as incubators. She argued that pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing imposed physical, social, and psychological disadvantages upon women. Firestone believed that the only way for women to free themselves from these biological impositions would be to seize control of reproduction.
To that end, she advocated for the development of cybernetic and assistive reproductive technologies, including artificial wombs, gender selection, and in vitro fertilization (the latter two now being in existence). In addition, she also advocated for the dissemination of contraception, abortion, and state support for child-rearing. It would be through these "revolts" and transformations that women could eliminate the presence of sexual classes. Firestone wrote:
The division of labor (and labor altogether) would be ended through cybernetics, she argued, so that the "tyranny of the biological family would be broken."[The] end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally.
Not a fan of traditional biological human reproduction, Firestone described pregnancy as "barbaric," and noted how a friend of hers described labor to "shitting a pumpkin."
Modern feminists have largely turned a blind eye to Firestone and the role of technology in feminist discourse, but her influence can still be seen today in such things as transhumanism and the rise of postgenderist theory.
Soon after the publication of Dialectics, Firestone excused herself from public life and largely disappeared from the scene. In 1998 she published her book, Airless Spaces, in which she detailed her struggles with schizophrenia. Firestone became reclusive in her later years, dying alone in her apartment. She is survived by her mother, two brothers, and two sisters.
So what are people's thoughts on how might such technology affect society once it becomes viable and widespread? Certainly, as the first article says, it'd be a huge boon to any same sex couples, transgender people, and infertile people who want kids.
Not to mention it'd give women who want children the choice of a safe alternative to pregnancy and childbirth, and all the unplesantries, pain and even possible death that comes with it, thereby putting them on equal reproductive terms with men as per Firestone's theory. (Key word being 'choice.' Certainly the option to have children naturally would still exist; in the above-mentioned Vorkosigan saga, something like a quarter of births are still natural in the society where the uterine replicator was invented, though whether this would be an accurate ratio in the real future when ectogenesis is commercially available remains to be seen, of course). I believe it's a good example of how advanced technology can eventually overcome the unfairness of biology and the harshness of nature.
