Such an invention would free women from the physiological burden of reproductive labour. It would also revolutionise fertility by expanding the number of people whose wish to have children can be fulfilled. Enormous direct value to human lives would be created by allowing such earnest desires to be met. In addition, if more people who want children could have children, then the global fertility collapse we are currently experiencing could be greatly reduced in severity, with beneficial political, social, and economic consequences for all.
The idea of a fully artificial womb in which foetuses are created and gestate until ready to be born has long been a staple of science fiction. But it seems increasingly possible that it could actually be achieved. At one end of the gestation process are advances in biomedical technology that allow embryos to be created from gametes adapted from ordinary skin cells and grown for several weeks 'in vitro'. At the other end, special incubation chambers have been used for decades to keep premature babies alive and developing. New versions are intended for babies as young as 13 weeks. Although huge scientific and technological challenges remain - especially understanding and mimicking the highly choreographed process that transforms an embryo into a foetus - humanity could and should take them on.
There are at least 3 huge benefits of fully artificial womb technology:
- Liberating women from the physiological burden of reproduction
- Increasing access to reproduction to those physiologically incapable
- Reducing the global fertility collapse
1. Liberating Women
At the heart of the social injustice suffered by women in every time and place of humanity's existence is the asymmetric burden of reproduction. Women are more than baby factories, but the hard fact is that they are also baby factories. There is currently no other way to make people than growing them inside female people.
Women have been substantially freed from other gendered labour by technological (and capitalist) developments, especially the preparation of food and textiles that once required monotonous repetitive work for most hours of the day. This allowed women to leave the home and take up more interesting and meaningful work. Yet the labour of pregnancy remains theirs alone.
Physically, pregnancy is not only lengthy, but also an extremely uncomfortable and dangerous labour to put one's body through. Moreover, pregnancy disrupts any other projects one is trying to pursue (such as a career), and also comes with all kinds of moral, social, and legal pressures such as to conform to gendered norms of motherhood and to refrain from consuming anything that might possibly endanger the full flourishing of the foetus.
All this makes pregnancy a rather unattractive proposition to many women. So it is a good thing that women in most parts of the world can now opt out of it if they do not think the benefit is worth the cost (thanks to rights and contraception). Unfortunately, if they do opt out - as a great many women do - then they will usually be giving up on the opportunity to have children, and they would be making that weighty choice for both themselves and their heterosexual partner.
A fully artificial womb promises liberation for women from both the physical and social burden of reproduction and the moral burden of having to make reproductive choices for others as well as themselves.
2. Greater Access to Reproduction
Only women with the right apparatus in good working order can conceive and bring a baby to term. This is a minority of the adult population. It leaves out all the other kinds of people who might want to have children and would be good parents: men (single or in gay relationships), or women who are infertile for age or other reasons.
Artificial wombs would expand access to reproduction to the many people who don't happen to have the right physiological apparatus. Having children of their own is both deeply desired by many people and objectively valuable as part of a meaningful life (previously), and so - all else being equal - it is a good thing if more people are able to achieve it. Just as it is a good thing if more people are able to study subjects they are interested in or if they are able to a job that they find enjoyable and meaningful.
Artificial wombs would also give the minority who do happen to have the right physiological apparatus more time to choose whether they want children of their own. That would allow women to pursue a career or other projects as well as children, rather than having to make a fraught choice between them as many now feel forced to.
3. More Babies
Thanks to rights and contraception, women now generally have the number of children they intend to. But there is a significant gap between the number of children women typically identify as their ideal and the number they actually intend to have, because the latter is their all-things-considered-let's-be-sensible-about-this-plan. Artificial wombs would dramatically reduce the physiological costs of reproduction, as well as many related costs (such as career disruption). That makes reproduction more affordable, and so we should expect that more women will have more children as they can move their planned family size closer to their ideal.
Thanks to rights and contraception, it is also now generally the case that only the women who can have babies who get to decide whether there will be new babies. This is a good thing. Women's bodies are their own. But it is also a limitation given that lots of people who can't have babies still want to be parents. Artificial wombs would remove fertile women's effective veto over the right to reproduction and hence remove the major restriction that currently keeps the supply of children below the demand. So we should expect rather more children to be born in a world with artificial wombs.
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| Source: The Economist |
That turns out to be a good thing not only for the many people who could not otherwise become parents, but also because the world is experiencing a rather dramatic fertility collapse.
While there is nothing wrong in principle with a declining global population, the speed of this change will have dramatic consequences for many societies. Some countries are on course to have next generations half the size of the current one. Insofar as a society is an extended scheme for cooperation across generations, this is a major crisis. How is a fair burden of the benefits and burdens of such cooperation - such as pensions and elder-care - to be established between such asymmetrically sized cohorts?
We should not expect the introduction of artificial wombs to reverse this trend of declining fertility entirely (that would cause a different crisis!). But it should reduce its size and speed, and hence the degree to which it throws societies around the world into social, political, and economic crisis. That alone would make it worth the substantial costs of developing and scaling the relevant technologies, and is an argument that should appeal even to governments that don't care about the welfare of their populations for their own sake.
