Babies with no biological mother - breakthrough for male same-sex couples, or further erasure of women?

Agree wholeheartedly

But soon they won't need human women to incubate babies. Sorry but this is the truth and lots of women (not me) would welcome this.

A woman who "carries the baby" IS a biological mother. Duh.

Because…..

Pharma is controlled, food is controlled and more so with loss of farmland and farming, water is controlled. In the future it will be easy to provide mass contraception, and then only the chosen ones will procreate. Sounds far fetched, but it’s where we’re heading, and most can’t see it.

A surrogate mother can also be the biological mother. This sometimes happens when a woman donates her eggs to another woman (often a sister or close friend/relative) and also carries the child to full gestation for her.

I think things like this are terrible. Inevitably such a thing would take multiple attempts to perfect meaning a real live person has to live with the potential imperfections of such an experiment.

There are real children in care who could be adopted

Brave New World eh? Ffs

The hubristic part was running advertising campaigns to tell millions of women that formula was better than breast milk and pushing it in the third world. If they’d created formula but it had remained something that was only used when breastfeeding wasn’t working, it wouldn’t have been hubristic, it would have been addressing a medical need.

My thoughts are that it is always questionable to create a child, have it carried inside a woman for months, then separate the two. Of course there are situations where this has to be the case, but back when we were doing all our studying for adoption there was so much about the trauma placed on children separated from their birth mothers. They've spent their entire existence hearing her voice, her heartbeat, and it can be harmful to remove them unless absolutely necessary. This is why I'm also kinda on the fence about surrogacy. It's more about the adults wants than the what's best for the child.

Wow, what a world indeed.

They are definitely looking into making sperm from skin cells as well as eggs. The technology is not exactly the same as that used in the study that generated these latest articles, though, which was about putting genetic material into a donated egg that had had its genetic material removed. In the articles I've read that mention sperm, they are talking about creating stem cells from skin cells and then coaxing those stem cells into becoming eggs or sperm.

What I find really interesting is that while most headlines seem to focus on the advances in creating eggs, I remember reading one article that mentioned how much easier it is to create sperm, they are just a bag of DNA after all, way less complicated. So theoretically, they may perfect the technology to create sperm much sooner, meaning women could soon be able to easily reproduce without men. Just need a quick skin swab from your bestie, a couple of trips to the corner lab, and a turkey baster (or if you're fancy, artificial insemination in a doctor's office 😜). And all our offspring would be girls, because we only have X chromosomes in our cells. All-female colony anyone? Would we miss men? Only kidding. Sort of. 😁

What's actually terrifying, and I've never seen it addressed in any article I've read on this subject, is the door this could open for people to steal other people's gametes and have their babies without them knowing. Taylor Swift fan? All you'd need to do is find an old coffee cup she threw away and you could have her baby! This would apply to men too, because you'd be able to make sperm from a dude's skin cells just as easily. Famous people are going to have to worry about a lot more than the paparazzi if this technology becomes commonplace. We all are. We're used to our gametes being rather difficult to access, giving us full control over who we let near them. But when every cell on our body can be turned into a gamete, that control goes away completely. Scary world we live in.

A woman who uses an egg donator but gestates the child herself and raises it is the child’s mother.

I'm pretty sure, in the UK, legally as well, including if the pregnancy is part of a surrogacy arrangement.

Why would you force a child to never have a mother.

That's not parenting, it's quite the opposite. It's just selfish and cruel.

Good point. Perhaps we should start talking about "genetic mother" and "gestational mother" to keep the women who play these roles visible as reproduction becomes more industrialised. Otherwise the fact that real human women are still required by the "machine" may be glossed over and devalued.

Redefining ‘biological mother’ to mean only genetic mother, for example an egg donator, is erasing mothers.

A woman who uses an egg donator but gestates the child herself and raises it is the child’s mother. Not genetic mother, but mother in every other and more important sense, and certainly ‘biologically’.

You said "surrogate biological mother" though. A surrogate mother is not the woman who provides the egg, it's the woman who carries the child.

There will have to be a biological mother. We are nowhere near being able to gestate a foetus in anything other than a living woman's womb.

Yes but they still wouldn't necessarily be the biological mother.

The biological mother would be the woman that supplied the egg regardless of who carries the embryo to full gestation.

If there is no egg at all, then there is no biological mother at all.

I did see something the other day about growing lambs in plastic bags of some sort of fluid, but was too icked out by it to register where I read it. I couldn't get my head round it so didn't read to the end and couldn't find it again to see if it segwayed into humans.

There will have to be a biological mother. We are nowhere near being able to gestate a foetus in anything other than a living woman's womb.

Kickstarting the bundle of cells is the relatively easy bit. You still ain't going to get from that to a baby without a woman.

However, you can bet every coin in your bank account that when that baby is born, the headlines are all about the amazng breakthrough of the bundle of cells, while the vital and irreplaceable role played by a woman to achieve anything that could be considered a success is just taken for granted.

The mothers and fathers will be the people who raise the child. If there is genuinely no biological mother I see no problem with being raised by two fathers.

The only time I have a problem is when there is a surrogate biological mother completely out of the picture. I think the child then misses out on that relationship.

I agree...on formula,,it's good it's there and women shouldn't feel not breastfeeding is the end of the world. But breastmilk is still very important if it can be used.

I agree with your unease: but isn't this a bit hard on fathers? Do you really think they generally don't love their kids as much?

They're also working on IVG for lesbian couples to do the same.

What do you think about IVG for lesbian couples? They're also working on that

I might be getting this wrong, but one of the things that irritated me most about the reporting, regardless of the ethical questions involved, was the way the reporter kept referring to this as a game changing miracle for "same sex couples". The last time I looked at least half of those same sex couples were female, and until they can make an egg into sperm surely this technique can't be utilised for lesbian couples? Am I missing something or is this just the usual erasure of half of the human race?