[Excerpted from "Why Not Artificial Wombs?" by Center fellow Christine Rosen, in the Fall 2003 issue of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Science and Technology.]
Artificial wombs are just the kind of technological prospect that postmodern ethicists love to celebrate. . . . 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.
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. . . . Other concerns—such as turning procreation into manufacture or severing the biological connection between mothers and newborns—are simply brushed aside. . . .
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 "made." Let’s say, for example, that scientists perfect the artificial womb to the point where it becomes a "healthier" environment than the old-fashioned human version. Artificial wombs, after all, wouldn’t 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’t. (As an aside: Imagine "expectant mothers" stopping by the incubation clinic once a week to check up on their "unborn" child.) . . .
Artificial wombs would create serious disruptions in our relationships with our children. "It would weaken the mother-child bond," says Rosemarie Tong, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a leading scholar in feminist bioethics. "Indeed, 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."
It is this prospect—children without mothers, babies molded in machines which chills the blood when reading of children being "decanted" in Brave New World. How would these gestational foundlings differ from children developed in human wombs? Are there things about the womb that we simply can’t replicate but that might, in fact, be integral to healthy human development? To be "born of woman" may involve more than simply an old technique, the best means now available for gestating a child, but perhaps one day superceded by our own ingenuity. . . .
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—rather than a cow or an incubator—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.
