Australian News Report on Premature Baby Incubated in ‘Artificial Womb’

This is further to the video I put up earlier about the possibility of artificial wombs and EctoLife’s wretched proof of concept video promoting their plans for a hatchery. This is another video that came up for me on YouTube. It’s a news report from Sydney’s 7 News posted by the Women and Infants Research Foundation about a very premature baby, who was kept alive and brought to term through being incubated in an artificial womb. In fact the womb is a plastic bag filled with oxygen to help the baby’s lungs develop naturally. It’s clearly related to the biobags developed at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, although those were filled with amniotic fluid. The video looks forward to further experiments on baby lambs where the bags would be filled with amniotic fluid. As it is, although the bag used was described as an artificial womb, it’s not that far from a conventional incubator.

While I’m obviously pleased that this technique was able to save the baby’s life, and hopefully other babies like him, I have very strong moral reservations about the development of true artificial wombs and the type of hatcheries that EctoLife are keen to develop. The fact that this technique has not become mainstream suggests that it either doesn’t work as effectively as predicted or else medical authorities are extremely worried about the ethical implications of this research.

Video on the Development of Artificial Wombs

Hashem al-Ghaili posted this fascinating and chilling video on his channel on YouTube two years. It begins with a description and images of a hatchery of birth pods containing human babies, almost exactly like that unveiled this week by EctoLife as a proof of the concept. It then goes back and traces the scientific development of the technology. The first artificial womb was designed in the 1950s but not built. Then researchers in Japan built and test one using goat fetuses. It then moves on 2017 and the experiments with infant lambs in biobags at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital before ending two years ago with very elaborate pods which also monitor the baby’s vital signs. The video states that artificial wombs have been designed to help premature babies, especially those born before 24 weeks, whose survival rates are almost negligible.

The similarity between the pods in the video and EctoLifes is very close, which suggests to me that the people developing this concept have been doing it in one form or another for a very long time. While I have no arguments against helping premature babies to survive, there are huge moral questions over the way such technology would lead, such as the complete abolition of natural birth and the mass manufacture of human beings in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

CBC News Report on Infant Lambs in Experimental Artificial Wombs

I found this video on YouTube after the reports the other day about the company, EctoLife, unveiling its concept of a mass hatchery for the artificial gestation of human babies. This video is five years old and comes from the CBC/ the National, and is on experimental artificial wombs, ‘biobags’, created by Dr Emily Partridge and her team at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. These appear to be clear plastic bags filled with a fluid closely approximating the amniotic fluid of the womb. The animals being gestated in them are infant lambs taken from their mothers by C-section, and fed through an artificial umbilical cord. The experiment is being done to see if this technique can be used for severely premature human babies that have been born after 23 weeks. At the moment a great number of these babies die, and those that survive need special care, such as being put on ventilators because of their delicate, undeformed lungs. They may also experience health problems for the rest of their lives. The report notes that the lambs in the biobags appear to be breathing normally, even developing wool. After being used in the experiment, they are euthanised and the bodies dissected as part of the experiment.

I knew that there were experiments on goat fetuses in this direction, as it was discussed in a ’90s issue of Scientific American, but was unaware of this experiment. While this isn’t as chilling, nor as far-fetched as EctoLife, and there is a genuine, medical purpose behind the research – the artificial gestation of premature babies, rather than the mass manufacture of human infants – it still nevertheless brings the prospect of the artificial hatcheries of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World a step closer, with all the ethical questions that brings.

Brave New World Comes Closer as Company Launches Concept of Artificial Womb Facility

This is really chilling. Interesting Engineering, a YouTube channel devoted to news about cutting edge science and technology, put up a piece today about a company, EctoLife, launching the concept of a mass artificial womb facility, that could produce 30,000 births a year. The channel said that the use of the term ‘produce’ was deliberate, as the company also intends to have tools that would allow parents to customise their children.

For more information, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEuiOszNd6msGgqsD0f9YAQ/community?lb=Ugkxv37SPqDJAmrUqHasXxF3p0NVguxZewuj.

This is really chilling, as it seems some moron has read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and thought it was a good idea. Huxley’s SF classic is set in a community 200 years after the Fordist Revolution. The family has been abolished and children are born from hatcheries, genetically manipulated and conditioned for their predetermined roles in society. Sex is purely recreational, and parental terms like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are considered obscenities and unspeakable insults if directed at people. Drugs are used recreationally, and it’s a hedonistic culture directed towards pleasure in which genuine cultural progress has ceased, and art, literature and so on aren’t valued. I think it’s been filmed at least twice. There was a miniseries in the 1980s/90s, if I remember correctly, and another TV version at the beginning of this century.

People have been predicting the development of artificial wombs for a long time. Way back around 1984/5 the Observer ran a piece about them and what they would mean for the people born from them. They were also included in one of the articles speculating about future scientific discoveries and how they would impact humans in a 1990s issue of Scientific American. This included a photo of goat embryos being grown in a lab.

There are any number of ethical issues about this. The most immediate is the divorce of human reproduction from biology. I can see how the development of such techniques could help those women, who want children but are physically unable to carry a child. But this also raises the spectre of the mass industrial production of humans, the withering away or abolition of the traditional family and its replacement by the company or the state, as well as the genetic engineering of humans to suit the wishes of the parents. This is really dark, dystopian stuff, and recalls some of the fears that were discussed with the development of test-tube children back in the 1970s.

On the other hand, I do wonder if this is actually a serious proposition. A number of companies have announced very ambitious scientific schemes in the past. Back in the 90s once again, one American company declared it was seriously interested in developing a space elevator. That’s a giant lift that would take capsules up into space so they could be launched using far less energy than on Earth. That’s an idea made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his book The Fountains of Paradise. It also needs far tougher materials than are available at present. In order to withstand the immense weight and stresses, the elevator would need to be made of a material 80 times stronger than steel. There have been interesting developments in the creation of tough carbon fibres, but at the present level of technology the construction of such an edifice is impossible. There was a piece in one of the popular science mags, I think it may have been New Scientist, in which the author predicted that we’d see space elevators in perhaps two or three decades’ time, given recent progress. Well, perhaps. But I’m still sceptical, just as I’m sceptical about this ever becoming a reality. Note that they’re talking about ‘concept’ rather than reality. That says to me that this may well be just hype, and they’re actually a long way away from creating it.

Lab Grown Goats and the Shape of Wombs to Come

I found this photo of goat fetuses growing in tanks filled with amniotic fluid in a Japanese lab in an old an old issue of Scientific American Presents – Your Bionic Future from autumn 1999. It illustrated an article by Tabitha M. Powledge, ‘The Ultimate Baby Bottle’, which had on the contents page the comment ‘Aldous Huxley was right. Artificial wombs are in our future.’ I hope, I really hope that they aren’t. At least, not in the way he portrayed it in Brave New World. In the book, the Fordists have abolished natural reproduction so that everyone is grown artificially in hatcheries. As a result, sex is only for pleasure – and as this is a hedonistic society there are plenty of orgies – and the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are dirty terms of abuse. This is definitely not a society anyone would want to see realised. On the other hand, milder forms of such reproduction have also been suggested. The people of humanity’s first extraterrestrial colony also reproduce in hatcheries in Brian Aldiss’ and David Wingrove’s history of the future, The Third Millennium. And in Paul McAuley’s book, In The Belly of the Whale, the two human species on Fomalhaut also reproduce through cloning in hatcheries, but are placed with surrogate parents who raise them in something like a normal family structure after their birth.

The success of the Japanese scientists in growing the goat fetus’ generated a considerable interest at the time. It was widely predicted, as the Scientific American article did, that this would lead to artificial wombs. In fact there was speculation about possible breakthroughs in such research a decade earlier in the 1980s. About 1984/5 I remember an article appearing in the Absurder which predicted that some day people would be gestated in such devices.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about this. I can admire the scientific skill behind it, and it does touch that part of me that enjoys seeing Science Fiction become reality. I can also see that it would benefit women, who for one reason or another could not carry a baby to term. But I don’t know how women would react to such machines if they became possible. I realise that pregnancy and childbirth are fraught, dangerous times for women and their children. Many women go through everything from the discomfort of bad backs and morning sickness to far worse conditions that may seriously damage their health. The other night there was a piece on the One Show, for example, about the dangers to pregnant women from a condition that causes severe nausea. And then there are the problems and dangers in childbirth itself.

But femininity throughout history has been intimately bound up with motherhood. So much so that in many traditional societies the view of women has been that of baby factories, whose primary role is the bearing and raising of children. Modern feminism challenges this in order to give women the freedom to work outside the home in previously masculine roles and professions. But I am not sure if women would welcome the complete separation of femininity from motherhood. Would women feel somehow diminished, deprived of a vital component of their womanhood, if there was a wholesale move towards artificial reproduction? Part of the psychological motivation behind gender critical feminisms opposition to transwomen being accepted as women is a powerful feeling that this is men usurping and appropriating femininity, while marginalising natural biological women. Reading through some of the comments on Kellie-Jay Kean’s videos, I came across some women talking about the joy they felt as women bearing children. One women said that men’s lives must be so empty because of their inability to do so. Now these are just a few women’s views, but I do wonder how women with a similar attitude would look upon artificial wombs.

I also wonder whether there would be the same strong bond between parents, and especially mothers, and their children if babies weren’t born naturally but collected from the hatchery. I realise that the parents of adopted children are in a similar position, and generally greatly love their children, as, of course, to step-parents. I’m also well aware of the dreadful neglect and abuse some parents inflict on their kids. It’s perfectly possible, therefore, that bringing your baby home from the lab for their first time would have all the emotional impact of a natural birth and that the parental bond wouldn’t be affected. But nevertheless, I wonder.

And I’m also worried that such hatcheries could lead to the further mechanisation of what would once have been considered essential human traits, to produce genuine post-human creatures like the cyborgs of the transhumanists. These could be far beyond us in their capability while at the same time lacking in what we consider to be our essential human natures, like the Cybermen and Sontarans of Dr. Who.

These are deep, ethical issues. But fortunately, they have become pressing just yet, as the promised artificial wombs have yet to appear.

‘I’ Article About Research into Artificial Wombs and their Morality

This is another science story from yesterday’s I for 7th January 2020. It’s about current research into developing artificial wombs. At the moment, these would be for very premature babies, but they could in theory go much further, which raises some serious ethical issues.

The article by Alla Katsnelson, ‘Baby in a bag: could humans be grown in an artificial womb?’ runs

Critically preterm babies face an uncertain future. Although a foetus is considered viable at 24 weeks of gestation, only about 60 per cent of babies born so young will survive, and many will experience life-long complications.

For those born a couple of weeks earlier, the statistics are even more dire: just 10 per cent of babies born at 22 weeks are likely to survive.

building a so-called artificial womb could potentially save these babies. In October, researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands announced that they had received a grant for E2.9m (£2.5m) to develop a prototype of such a device. But the project isn’t the only artificial womb on the horizon. In 2017, researchers in Philadelphia transferred foetal lambs, aged between 105 and 115 days of gestation (equivalent to about 28 to 30 weeks human gestation), into a so-called biobag filled with artificial amniotic fluid. After several weeks in the bag, the lambs developed normally. And in March 2019, an Australian and Japanese research team kept younger lambs, about 95 days’ gestational age, alive in a different system.

Dr Matthew Kemp, who led the latter work, admits that researchers don’t fully understand foetal growth in the womb, which makes replicating it a challenge. The Dutch group noted plans to roll out a clinic-ready prototype in five years, but Dr Kemp says it will probably take much longer. And because the technology is so costly, it’s unlikely to be widely available any time soon.

So far, what researchers call artificial wombs are essentially souped-up incubators. They provide a fluid-filled space in which a foetus can receive nutrients and oxygen through a ‘placenta’. From there to full-on ectogenesis – incubating foetuses outside a human for the full duration of a pregnancy – is an enormous leap.

But many bioethicists note that technology moves quickly, and proactively thinking through the possibilities is important.

In this more futuristic vision, artificial wombs can do a lot for society, says Dr Elizabeth Yuko, a bioethicist at Fordham University in New York. It could allow people who can’t carry a pregnancy for whatever reason – illness, infertility, age, or gender – to do so. It might also shift some of the childbearing responsibilities carried by women. But it also raises concerns. For example, ex-utero gestation would probably turn reproductive rights on their head, says Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Manchester. If a foetus can gestate outside a woman’s body, the choice fo whether or not to have the baby might be deemed out of her hands.

Another issue is that our legal rights are predicated on having been born alive. “I don’t think that a gestating subject in an artificial womb necessarily meets that requirement,” says Romanis. “That raises some questions about human entities ex-utero that have never existed before.

There have been newspaper articles about the development of artificial wombs since the 1980s, at least. The Absurder published one c. 1985, and I think the Independent also published one in the 1990s. And the whole area of artificial reproduction has been a live issue since the first ‘test tube’ baby created through in vitro fertilisation in the 1970s. But it also raises the spectacle of the kind of dystopian society Aldous Huxley portrayed in Brave New World, where humans are bred in hatcheries, engineered and conditioned for their future role in society. The Auronar, the telepathic race to which Cally, one of the heroes of the Beeb’s SF series, Blake’s 7, also reproduced through artificial gestation.And one of the predictions in Brian Stableford’s and David Langford’s future history, The Third Millennium, is that during this millennium this will be the preferred method of human reproduction, at least in some extraterrestrial colonies. And over a decade Radio 4 broadcast a series in which various intellectuals created fictional museums. One was ‘the museum of the biological body’, set in a post-human future in which people were neuter cyborgs born from hatcheries. This is obviously very far off, and I doubt anywhere near the majority of humans would ever want to reject gender and sexuality completely, whatever certain sections of the trans community might believe.

As with cloning and Dolly the Sheep, it raises very profound and disturbing questions about humanity’s future and how far technology should expand into the area of reproduction.