FDA schedules meeting to establish regulatory rules for artificial womb trials
fda.gov
fda.gov
The non-religious aspects of the abortion debate partly hinge on this idea of fetal viability (specifically, the time at which most fetuses have a high chance of survival outside the womb), and I could imagine artificial wombs bringing that viability threshold down a bit. Which then opens the door to a whole other debate about whether terminating a pregnancy could (or should) involve transplantation. I know some current bioethics argue that abortion is currently permissible because the death of the fetus is merely a side effect of terminating a pregnancy, rather than its goal...
A lot of Hollywood stars these days are using surrogacy, it is quite common: https://people.com/parents/celebrities-who-have-used-surroga...
True, and if you saw what played out during COVID you'll realize there is a massive market for this: during COVID healthy, viable sperm supply outstripped supply significnatly, and the market dynamics went into effect. Some so brazen as to advertise on FB to do so [0].
Surrogacy continued to thrive during COVID and was only hampered because of the Russian invasion, it is hoime to perhaps one of the biggest fertility/surrogacy countries on Earth. Lots of children were born during the war and have not been reunited with their families yet, either.
It's one of the many stark and bleaker parts of the War and ultimately about the Human Condition that make me think that while we are likely inching closer towards a Brave New World situation, with all the dire implications that go along with it, that when it comes to fertility this might be the best of all bad solutions.
Personally, I have chosen to delay having children for what will likely be another decade, after not following in my parent's or siblings footsteps of having children in their 20s. Its a conscious decision but ultimately a forced one: namely political strife, environmental factors and climate change are at the forefront but there are more. And seeing fertility rates absolutely crater in the 21st century in anything but the most economically dire of places (namely Africa and India) I think having the framework ahead of the device might be wise as we will have to eventually kick-start a new baby-boom in order just to reach a semi-parity as millennials like myself enter as the larger cohort with similair delays in childbirth--I''m an outlier in having children, most of my friends over 30 just don't even want children if they haven't already had them.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/sperm-donors-fac...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/world/europe/ukraine-surr...
I would recommend to anyone who eventually wants children someday to not delay. Fertility worldwide will get worse before it gets better.
EDIT: Holy cow, this post got way, way longer than I expected.
The first step in the analysis is that, since no abortion law has been enacted by the US government, each State has its own set of abortion laws. Because killing a person is clearly illegal, the legality (not morality or ethics) of abortion hinges on when a developing clump of cells becomes protected under the law.
States have severe disagreement on that point. For example, consider the state of Georgia. The following is their definition of a person:
> There are two classes of persons: natural and artificial. “Natural person” means any human being including an unborn child. Corporations are artificial persons. They are creatures of the law and, except insofar as the law forbids it, they are subject to be changed, modified, or destroyed at the will of their creator. Unless otherwise provided by law, any natural person, including an unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat, shall be included in population based determinations. As used in this Code section, the term: “Detectable human heartbeat” means embryonic or fetal cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the heart within the gestational sac. “Unborn child” means a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb. [2]
By law in Georgia, the status of personhood applies to a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb with embryonic or fetal cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the heart within the gestational sac. The preposition "in the womb" clearly indicates a womb present in a human being, as it doesn't say "in a womb." As such, I do not expect legal personhood will automatically extend to a human being gestated in an artificial womb in Georgia.
On the other hand, consider the state of Massachusetts. The very beginning of their code is:
> All persons who are citizens of the United States and who are domiciled in this commonwealth are citizens thereof. [3]
Now, does the state of Massachusetts define in the state code what a "person" is? As far as I can tell, no, they don't (if someone else knows better, please chime in). A ballot initiative is trying to do that right now [4]. It seems that what constitutes a person in Massachusetts is less clear than in Georgia and is more a function of general consensus in society. As such, it's possible that a human being gestated in an artificial womb in Massachusetts would have legal personhood, and it's also possible that legal personhood is granted by governing authority. It's difficult to state.
What about at the federal level? The US code speaks on personhood as follows:
> [For the federal government], the words “person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual”, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development. As used in this section, the term “born alive”, with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion. [1]
At the federal level, the status of personhood is attained when an infant homo sapiens is completely removed from his or her mother.
So, by these laws, abortion becomes murder in Georgia after the heartbeat of a homo sapiens in the womb is detected, in Washington DC when an infant homo sapiens is completely removed from their mother, and in Massachusetts...well, it's complicated. Because the attainment of personhood is unclear, it's unclear precisely when abortion becomes murder. As such, Massachusetts specifically legislates when abortion is and isn't permissible without reference to personhood [5]. EDIT: In Wisconsin, before Roe and now post-Roe, abortion is murder.
So, on artificial wombs, based on current laws, I'd wager: Georgia will say you're not a person, Massachusetts will be the Wild West, Wisconsin says you're a human being but not born alive, and the federal government says you're not a person.
In my personal opinion, clear definition of legal personhood is the best approach, particularly because personal rights under the law stem from recognition as a legal person. From there, it becomes simple to state the precise conditions of when a clump of cells gains legal rights, be that at conception, presence of heartbeat, or live birth.
This is obviously hypothetical and should not be done, but I wonder if an evil company could exploit Georgia's laws to set up artificial womb farms and produce non-person human beings who exist solely as property. Georgia could easily prevent this by explicitly banning artificial wombs.
I believe these FOUR (not three, see edit) perspectives capture the essential elements of artificial womb legality across the USA.
EDIT: I kept doing some research, and Wisconsin's perspective distinct from those three:
>[Concerning an abortion]...“unborn child" means a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive. [8]
> Live birth: In this subsection, “breathes" means draws air into and expels it out of the lungs one or more times. “Live birth" means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother, of a human being, at any stage of development, who, after the expulsion or extraction, breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, a cesarean section, or an abortion, as defined in s. 253.10 (2) (a). [6]
> An individual who undergoes a live birth is born alive. If a statute or rule refers to a live birth or to the circumstance in which an individual is born alive, the statute or rule shall be construed so that whoever undergoes a live birth as the result of an abortion...has the same legal status and legal rights as a human being at any point after the human being undergoes a live birth as the result of natural or induced labor or a cesarean section. [The preceding] may not be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract a legal status or legal right that is applicable to a human being at any point before the human being undergoes a live birth. [7]
Wisconsin doesn't designate personhood like Georgia does but instead says a human being comes into existence at conception and is born alive when undergoing a live birth or born during a failed abortion procedure. Note their "live birth" definition's alignment with the federal government's. However, an artificial womb in Wisconsin may create a situation where you're a human being but never born alive, meaning the definition of "unborn child" is not satisfied, meaning you can do anything you want to a human being created in an artificial womb.
Interestingly, the long-existing Wisconsin definition of "unborn child" was unworkable under the Roe v. Wade paradigm.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/8
[2] https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2022/title-1/chapter-2/...
[3] https://law.justia.com/codes/massachusetts/2022/part-i/title...
[4] https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Definition_of_a_Person...
[5] https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-law-about-ab...
[6] https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/document/statutes/990.01(19...
[7] https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/document/statutes/990.001(1...
[8] https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/document/statutes/940.04(6)
The text of the Georgia statute you cited only uses detectable human heartbeat as an example ("including"), not a requirement for personhood.
> “Unborn child” means a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb.
This would seem open-ended enough to apply to individual eggs.
Yes, an unborn child is as you state, but the state will count an unborn child in "population based determinations" only if the heartbeat is present. That's a big threshold, and it's my understanding that abortions in Georgia may be freely performed if no heartbeat is present, so it's in effect stating "no heartbeat = no personhood".
> This would seem open-ended enough to apply to individual eggs.
Hmm, not sure about that one. The definition of "unborn child" is not met if the gestating egg is not "in the womb."
No sources here cuz I just got home and I'm tired, but I swear there was some press recently(?) about IVF clinics fretting about egg storage/disposable for exactly this reason. I don't remember if anything came of it, but I think some IVF technicians were worried about going to jail if they, for instance, forgot to put an unfertilized egg back in the freezer and it went bad.
And then when you get to fertilized but non-implanted embryos, of course, that's when the "life begins at conception" crowd starts having their say.
The issue of fertilized but non-implanted embryos is already well-understood, as that is the entire basis behind opposition to embryonic stem cells and derived products. The interesting part will be to see how various religions will react if you tell them the fertilized egg will grow in an artificial womb.
Very simply, every "a fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is no different from "if a person needs a kidney or they will die, and you are a match for that person, then you are required to give them your kidney".
Adding an artificial womb to this does not change that. All that changes is what medical procedure is being forced.
Artificial wombs would allow people who for whatever reason are unable to get or remain pregnant, to have a child without having a surrogate involved. It does nothing more than that.
Alternatively, say you donated blood, and that blood is used to keep someone alive. Then they run out of that blood and need more, and you are the only option, but you've developed anemia or something, so no longer want to donate blood, by your own definition the state can now require you to keep giving blood anyway: This person is only alive now because of your actions, and your attempt to change those conditions would kill them.
Also the policy is "you should be forced to carry it to term", because abortion bans also come with a variety of bans on access to emergency contraceptives that would prevent it from even getting to the point of being a fetus in the first place, and the women-aren't-people crowd fight anything and everything else that would prevent many abortions occurring in the first place (access to contraceptives, actual sex ed, etc)
Right now abortion consists often in dismembering the fetus, killing him/her and then scraping him/her from the womb.
Hopefully in the future we can extract them from the womb and put them in an artificial womb instead.
It's also great for surrogacy and the Men Gone Their Own Way movement.
At the same time I fear it will be weaponised by governments to create humans at will and create armies (before robots are more viable)
> It changes that instead of killing a person you can carry the pregnancy to completion even if the mother wants to kill her unborn son/daughter.
If you can donate a kidney, and not doing so results in a person dying, there your decision not to kills them. More to the point, no one can force you to give up your kidney against your will. What you are saying is very clearly that the state should be able to just that.
> Hopefully in the future we can extract them from the womb and put them in an artificial womb instead.
Hopefully we can just force people to have a different forced medical procedure unlike the current one. After all, they're just women, it's not as if they have rights.
Also: embryos aren't people, the burning building test is really simple. Say a building is on fire, and you're running to escape and you come across a room containing a child and a load of fertilized eggs. Do you have to hesitate about grabbing the actual child?
Not sure if you're intentionally referencing Judith Jarvis Thompson's most famous (and in my opinion, greatest) essay with this comparison, but yeah, this is a common metaphor. The sick violinist and all.
But I think you may be discounting the role of viability too quickly, both in theory and in practice: in theory, because some bioethicists (I can't remember if JJT specifically falls into this camp, it's been a while) draw a distinction between terminating a pregnancy and actively destroying a fetus. They'd argue that it's fine to remove a gestating fetus from your body, but not so fine to tell the doctor performing the d&c "and make sure it's good and dead afterwards!" Under current medical practice, there's no practical difference between removal and "killing," simply because it's impossible for an underdeveloped fetus to survive outside the human womb... for now... dot dot dot...
And in practice, because fetal viability is often used to draw abortion boundaries in more permissable jurisdictions who don't restrict it outright. "Late term abortion" is a complicated issue, probably ill-suited for this forum, but viability is generally why you can't abort a healthy fetus three weeks before its natural due date.
A late term abortion is something that happens by someone who intended to, and presumably wanted to, carry to term. Pete Buttigieg had an interview on the subject in which he rightly pointed to the fact that in the context of "late term abortion" we're talking about a case where someone (or couple) are intending to bring a child into the world, and have likely chosen a name, arranged a room, got clothes and such lined up. For such people the choice is unlikely to be easy or desired, just the least awful of myriad terrible options, in which case why should state legislation be involved? Certainly the state has no involvement on removing life support from others, why is it involved here? (Let's look at the Schiavo case where conservative politicians tried to force a husband to keep his dead wife "alive" because with sufficient technology that was "possible")
Artificial uteri may expand the range of fetal viability, raising questions about the role that fetal viability plays within abortion law. Within severance theory, for example, abortion rights only include the right to remove the fetus, and do not always extend to the termination of the fetus. If transferring the fetus from a woman's womb to an artificial uterus is possible, the choice to terminate a pregnancy in this way could provide an alternative to aborting the fetus.
Refs:
1. "Built in Obsolescence: The Coming End to the Abortion Debate" https://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&c...
2. "Artificial Wombs Could Outlaw Abortion" https://web.archive.org/web/20191012213054/http://www.mattle...
Can the lab force the parents to pay the costs and have the child anyway?
Can the lab terminate the pregnancy? Would they run afoul of abortion laws?
If the lab completes the gestation, are they the guardians of the child? Is it an orphan, and ward of the state? Can the company request reimbursement?
Then they'd just drop parental leave.
I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, just pointing out the technology won’t stop there.
It’s the first step toward commoditizing human life, in a way that isn’t dependent on some Marxist analysis of capitalism. Maybe some think that’s fine, and that having designer children is “good”.
[1] https://malegislature.gov/Bills/193/HD3822
[2] https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-...
[3] https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/infographic
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/28/cross-b...
I'm glad that the people in power have everyone's best interests at heart /s
1. Prisoners owe a debt to society, that’s certainly one way to repay it, provided it’s voluntary. Same reason I’d support voluntary prison labor.
4. You could argue being a sex worker is far more exploitive of women. I think it’s not our place to say they can’t do that, as long as it’s voluntary.
Frankly it seems unethical to do otherwise if it’s an option.
Because we're a generation of snowflakes and I'd recommend to get a better set of friends you can talk freely about stuff.
People are so scared of being branded racist or nazi that common sense goes out of the door.
You're performing eugenics or selective breeding when you select a partner to have children with.
People with different ethnic backgrounds will have different characteristic and of course you want to maximise the chances of success for your kids.
Balancing them out (often by mixing races) and granting both parents advantages to the kids is the optimal solution.
For example, I got strong hairs from my dad and a dark skin from my mom so I'm not bald like relatives on my mom side and I can stand in the sun for way longer than my dad could.
What's wrong with that? I'd say we're genetically predisposed for doing that already, without access to information. Eg. I always liked blonde pale girls who are the polar opposite of myself
You can pick the sex of your kid too with IVF to the extent that if you have male and female embryos successfully extracted and frozen you can choose which ones to use.
What other kinds of pain and risk do you think people should be subject to?
FYI, evolution does not care about the wellbeing of the individual, nor is there any inherent reason the mechanism that evolution comes up with should be held up as the ideal.
Childbirth is remarkably dangerous, even under current medical standards. Even a successful natural birth tends to bring a whole host of complications afterwards, and it's not unreasonable to want to avoid that.
Let me be uncharitable here: do you really think a mom would love her baby any less just because she rip open her entire perineum in the process of pushing that baby out? (If so, I guess I have bad news for C-section babies...)
I'm pointing out that the same phenomenon where "parents" of children born via surrogacy feel less of an attachment to their child would be present in the AWT situation.
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/labor-delivery/topic...
The above list does not even include hemorrhoids that require a hemorrhoidectomy or retained placenta, both which require an operation where the mother has to go under anesthesia.
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...
This is an example of how the concept of the good has been bastardized, the idea that if a little bit of X is good, a lot of X necessarily is better. No, that it is good to get rid of the excruciating pain associated with childbirth does not imply getting rid of all the discomfort associated with childbirth is good. Our concept of good has been totally untethered from anything concrete; it has become nothing more than an abstract quantity to be optimized to maximum effect. But we don't stop to ask ourselves if getting rid of core human experiences is what we should be aiming for.
>evolution does not care about the wellbeing of the individual
Evolution doesn't care about the well being of the individual, but the individual has been optimized to find well being in the kinds of environments our ancestors evolved in. These environments included pains, hardship, pathogens, risk, uncertainty, etc. Using technology to decouple our lived experience from anything resembling the natural environments we evolved in can and will have detrimental side-effects. Technology is great in that it can potentially let everyone have the chance at a meaningful and fulfilled life. But we've gone so far beyond that, and we're seeing the results in the various diseases of modern life. We need to rethink our approach.
If you are framing the process of childbirth as discomfort, we will simply have to agree to disagree. Discomfort is stubbing your toe, or sleeping in an uncomfortable position and getting a frozen neck.
See the lists from this comment:
Without progress, the human experience involves a ton of maternal and infant mortality. And obviously everything has consequences, good and bad. These are not reasons to freeze the process of birthing a child to a specific point in time.
Not too long ago, malnutrition, hunger, and losing a few young family members to infections was “definitive” too.
It's also the first step toward other things...like solar exploration and maybe extra-solar exploration.
I don't know why you need to make things up, then try to argue about it. Seems like a waste of time.
That's not what I said. Technology is not a singular set of advancements to the next. As usual, nothing but bad faith responses. Good luck with whatever.
Designing kids and/or producing (for capitalistic purposes) them seems orthogonal to artificial wombs to me: that requires other things besides merely a couple who ask a hospital to fertilize their egg with their sperm and place it in a device.
One concern is that standardized use of this would seriously risk making humans go extinct in the future.
If we completely remove the selection constraint that humans are able to reproduce, over time functionality bugs will creep into that area. If, at any point in the future, society collapses to the point where we are no longer able to build these machines, we may no longer be able to reproduce and will simply die off.
Maintaining this constraint on humans seems prudent. If and when we can manipulate genetics well enough to fix the issue in the actual human organism in a way that is not fragile, then that would be fine.
I'm interested in reading more about this trend. But whatever the data, it does not sound "natural" to take that phenomenon and apply a mechanical solution to the problem. Taken to its logical conclusion, human reproduction becomes dependent on the availability of these mechanical interventions. That sounds like a really bad idea, at least to me.
>Designing kids and/or producing (for capitalistic purposes) them seems orthogonal to artificial wombs to me: that requires other things besides merely a couple who ask a hospital to fertilize their egg with their sperm and place it in a device.
It may sound that way, but needing a woman to gestate the new human is a barrier to this activity. Celebrities and the uber-wealthy, in some cases, already essentially rent the reproductive systems of ostensibly willing women for this purpose. Having an artificial means do to this would remove that barrier and significantly expand the market, so one proceeds from the other.
My wife has wide hips but our daughter couldn’t make her way through and needed a c-section. Maybe she could have made it after another 18 hours of labor, or maybe not.
Artificial wombs would certainly change the economics of surrogacy, but it's also a bit of a slippery slope to think it would commoditize it. It doesn't change most of what we know about IVF and likely keeps the same (relatively high) costs, it maybe just disrupts the labor market for surrogacy. (Which today from what I hear is an extremely expensive market prone to shortages.)
Seems to me that you've actually pointed to the reasons that, given that the technology is being pursued by industry, rulemaking is necessary, not premature.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/how-jeffrey...
At some point in the future, it will probably seem quaint and sort of primitive to grow humans inside of other humans - as well as rely upon random sperm and ovum selection. Why live with the inconvenience and increased risk when there are safer and easier ways to do it with more predictable results.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt15768848/#:~:text=The%20Pod%20Gen....
In fairness, Brave New World also did it back in 1931: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World. None of this is new ideas just that technology is catching up to science fiction.
Now multiply that about a thousand fold for this awful idea. We have no idea what the complex interplay between womb and foetus is, hormone and other signalling between mother and baby.
I know this is a tiny step, but really. Don't any of these people watch movies ? You know how bad this will get ...
Yes, movies are our guide. They are probably the most powerful of means to how we find the common set of rules and norms - the "culture war" is not some silly side argument, it is people looking for battle lines in defining the cultural norms of the 21C.
Hollywood and Bollywood and xxxwood will play enormous parts in that.
And we vote with our entry tickets
If your a guy/girl and you want a kid, men can do this womb thing if it works out and women can do the whole sperm bank/ots.