“It’s important both to consider that ectogenesis would represented a critical step in the shift from begetting children to making them, and that we are already some way down this path on account of our cultural acceptance and normalization of contraception, abortion, IVF, and same-sex marriage. With each step, the associated logic carries greater power.”

The Atlantic recently reported the successful gestation of a premature lamb in an artificial womb. Taking the fetuses of lambs with an equivalent level of development to a 23-week-old human fetus, they gestated the lambs in a special clear bag filled with an artificial amniotic fluid.

Although this technology is still at an early stage of development, it offers an exciting and welcome possibility for the care of premature infants in the future. The advent of such technologies will enable us to save lives that formerly would have been lost, and to minimize the harm to infants who are thrust too early from the womb. These are good reasons to be thankful for such an innovation.

Beyond the boon it represents for premature infants, many also believe such artificial gestation will significantly affect the abortion debate. Babies that would not previously have been viable outside of the womb will become viable, which will weigh in favor of restricting abortions at earlier stages in pregnancy. Arguments from the autonomy of the woman’s body will no longer have the same force when the child could be relocated to an artificial womb outside her body. At some point, one could imagine a woman’s position relative to her unborn child being closer to that of her male partner. Should the male partner desire not to terminate the pregnancy, the infant could be relocated to an artificial womb, and the mother would have to assume future responsibilities of care and provision.

Although such a scenario is hypothetical at this point, one of the most significant early changes will be in the “optics” of the abortion issue. Historically, this debate has been dramatically affected by technological advances in imaging the baby within the womb. The sight of the developing child, which the artificial womb will permit, may make depersonalizing and objectifying the unborn much more difficult. The invisibility of the unborn is one of the reasons why abortion is so thinkable in our society.

On account of the initial effect it might have on the abortion debate, I suspect many pro-life people will welcome such artificial gestation technology. Yet while there may be beneficial effects of this technology in the short term, for many people this technology represents an early step toward something different entirely.

Tyranny of Childbearing?

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone argued that women’s biology is a tyrannical force suppressing them in society. She called for technology to take the childbearing role from women, so that women could achieve their full potential. A socialist society would distribute parenting duties equally, so that women no longer bore disproportionate responsibility for raising children, and parents no longer had the unhealthy notion of “their” children. The “psychologically destructive” reality of genetic parenthood—a single biological mother and a father—would be replaced by “the diffusion of the responsibility for physical welfare over a larger number of people.” Bonds between children and adults would be marked by mutual agreement, and children would no longer have a particular attachment with their mothers. Society would be characterized by temporary nonfamilial household contracts with “consenting adults” and an officious socialist state.

Firestone lamented that developing an artificial placenta—potential deliverance from the tyranny of nature, the ground of female inequality in society—still had to be justified on the basis of providing care to premature infants. Within such technology, she saw something more profound: the liberation of women from the barbarism of their natural bodies.

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