It may sound far-fetched, but a breakthrough in Israel has brought us a step closer to creating artificial wombs for humans.
A team of Israeli scientists announced the mother of all inventions last week. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed in the journal Nature that they had successfully gestated hundreds of mice inside an artificial womb. They placed newly fertilised eggs inside glass vials rotating in a ventilated incubator, and grew the embryos for 11 days – the mid-point of a mouse pregnancy – outside their mothers’ bodies. The embryos developed normally; their hearts, visible through the glass vials, pounded steadily at 170 beats per minute.
The mice were no bigger than sunflower seeds, but what they represent is enormous: the breakthrough brings us one step closer to reproduction without pregnancy. The division of labour in gestation is the most intractable imbalance between the sexes. Men only have to contribute a single cell to make a baby, whereas women carry their children for nine months and give birth, sometimes risking their bodies and often risking their careers, in a world of work built largely by men. An artificial womb would mean complete reproductive parity between the sexes: all anyone needs to do is throw in their gametes and the rest is taken care of. But this equality could come at great cost to women. This is radically disruptive technology, and with every new development we are sleepwalking into a world of tough ethical choices.
The idea of babies grown in jars may conjure up images of the hatchery of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the foetus fields of The Matrix, but scientists have been trying to make it happen for decades. In 1992, Japanese researchers had some success growing goats inside rubber sacs. In 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) revealed they had grown lamb foetuses in plastic bags from the equivalent of around halfway through a typical ewe pregnancy to full term. In 2019, Dutch researchers received a €2.9m (£2.6m) grant from the EU to develop an artificial womb that would use replicas of human babies dotted with sensors before being deployed in hospitals.
The scientists behind these innovations are motivated by noble intentions: they want to save the most vulnerable human beings on the planet by improving outcomes for super-premature babies, or to understand early gestation, and why so many pregnancies end in miscarriage. Artificial wombs offer a window on to the closed world of embryonic development, so the reasons it might go wrong can be studied in real time. They allow the process of gestation to continue outside the body, so that babies born too soon no longer have to face the high risk of disability and chronic illness associated with extreme prematurity. It is hard to argue that something with such potential to save lives shouldn’t exist.
But artificial wombs could also undermine the basis of women’s reproductive rights and freedoms. In England, Scotland and Wales, the abortion limit is pegged to the viability of foetuses outside the human body; it’s currently set at 24 weeks’ gestation because foetuses at an earlier stage of development aren’t expected to be able to survive outside the womb. What if all foetuses, and even embryos, are potentially viable because they could be gestated inside an artificial womb? Any unborn child could be considered to have a right to life.
In countries where abortion is legal, access to it derives from a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body. But if unwanted babies could be “rescued” by technology – gestated inside an artificial womb and then given up for adoption – then abortion could be simultaneously pro-choice and “pro-life”. Why should a mother be able to decide to terminate an unwanted baby if an artificial womb can save its life?
This technology has been developed in order to rescue the world’s most vulnerable babies. It’s not so much of a conceptual leap to imagine that babies gestating inside the wombs of women who drink, smoke, take drugs or engage in risky behaviour during pregnancy could be considered vulnerable and worthy of rescue in an artificial womb. In a culture where pregnant women are constantly scrutinised and judged, and the state has the sometimes contentiously used power to declare mothers unfit and take away their children, the threat of this technology will have enormous potential to coerce and control pregnant women.
Many tech and media companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, VICE and Buzzfeed, already offer to cover the cost of freezing their employees’ eggs so they don’t have to worry about dwindling fertility during the most productive years for their careers. Gestating a baby in an artificial womb may one day be a choice open to elite women whose companies will pay for it, or who can afford to cover the cost themselves. “Natural” pregnancy could be seen as a sign of poverty, of unplanned pregnancy, or a chaotic lifestyle.
A full replacement for pregnancy may be decades away, but artificial wombs are coming sooner than you think. Right now there are teams of researchers across the globe working on competing systems to replicate the human womb. CHOP is in the process of getting the US Food and Drug Administration to approve trials of its “biobag” device with human babies, and other teams in Australia and Japan, are snapping at their heels.
The obstacles to growing humans outside the human body will be ethical and legal, not technological. We need to be discussing artificial wombs now, and the precautious, contingent basis of women’s reproductive rights, before this technology arrives in our hospitals and fertility clinics.
