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

It is an interesting question though.

If we were able to reproduce entirely artificially, no need for women to grow and ripen eggs, no need for men to produce sperm, no need for a woman's womb, how would we think about sex?

Would we introduce something into the process to randomly select sex (OMG actually assigning sex 😂) or would parents choose sex? Would we even have parents as we think of them?

And if sex were by choice, what would the choice be made on?

The problem is that humans have so far have a pretty poor track record at synthetically reproducing nature

This is it. Zealous scientists keep thinking they've replicated something exactly and then decades later find they didn't even know what they didn't know.

For example, when formula was invented, mothers were told it was better than breastmilk. But then they are still finding out all the time, subtle ways that breastmilk has useful stuff in it we didn't even know was there, and can't replicate.

Not least because breastmilk from one mother changes everyday, based on temperature, infection, even mood.

Another example is honey. There's all sorts of interesting compounds in honey that we haven't sequenced yet. And again honeybees will put different stuff in it depending on the weather or local threats etc.

If they can't make formula to be exactly the same as breastmilk, what hope have they of making artificial amniotic fluid that's exactly the same? Especially as it changes daily, based on other stuff going on?

It's hubris, thinking you can replicate this kind of thing. It's not Medicine like a hip replacement or a hearing aid. It's actual new life.

It's one thing a baby not having a mother due to bad circumstances, but to actually set out to deprive a baby of their mother, by design, feels evil to me. In general, no one will ever love you like your mother loves you.

I don't see this as erasure of women any more than the ability to make a baby from two eggs was the erasure of men.

This.

Well it’s better than having womrn as human incubators

That'll surely come. Maybe not in my lifetime, but it will. Maybe there'll come a time when pregnancy will be just for the poor; rich women will use an artificial womb.

ETA: spelling

I believe Dr. Ian Malcolm said something similar. And we all know how that turned out...

Im sure a Chinese company are attempting to to build artificial wombs.

Precisely.

This still requires one woman to donate the eggs and another one to carry the baby.

This has the potential to benefit women more than men because it means they are far less limited by age now. Egg quality and reserve deterioration would no longer be a problem, we can just make new ones.

All the women on here who can’t conceive or have IVF due to DOR, boom problem solved!

This is literally to cure infertility.

A woman who cannot produce eggs could use this process. Women made infertile from cancer treatment could use this.

Yep. Me too.

Possibly no genetic mother. But certainly a 'biological' one, since a woman would gestate the foetus and give birth to it. Women aren't incubators; they are mothers.

These people are all 'but kinship is based on care, not genetics!' right until they're 'ok, a woman is the only person who has so far had any relationship to this child but she is not related to it and definitely is not the mother even though she gave birth to it'. And they're 'mothers are birthing parents!' until they switch to 'birthing does not make you a parent'.

This method still required a female cell and would were it to proceed to gestation require a female mother.

As far as I can see, kicking a cell bundle off growing in vitro in ways other than the traditional egg meets sperm is the (relatively) easy part. The hard thing that we are nowhere near able to do yet is gestate a foetus outside the womb. Even with experiments that have sort-of approached a small degree of that like the male rat, behind the headlines there was a female rat frankensteined on to him delivering all the complex chemical signals that made the womb functional and the pregnancy viable.

All that said, theoretically I don't have an issue if we eventually find a way to reproduce that doesn't involve a woman undergoing pregnancy.

The problem is that humans have so far have a pretty poor track record at synthetically reproducing nature. We simplify it then realise all the stuff we thought wasn't needed was the stuff that made it work properly. UPF for example, or indeed gender reassignment treatments like cross sex hormones or surgery.

We split natural creatures or processes up into boxes to make it easier to reason about them but we forget the boxes aren't real, they are arbitrary divisions of a complete and interdependent system.

So sadly I suspect if we ever did grow babies outside the womb, it would look successful at first but over their lives those people would have higher than average incidents of something because the significance of whatever would have controlled that risk in the womb hadn't been appreciated and so hadn't been incorporated in the technology.

An egg's an egg, if it was created from a man I expect it would be close to his mother's DNA. I don't know how close to actually being done this is, it may have some good uses. A woman with no eggs may be able to use her own skin to make eggs or if she has genetic problems use her mother or father's skin. Why does everyone assume the worst?

The Taliban are going to be all over this. When they switch the internet back on…

It actually angers me that they’ve somehow managed to create embryos from skin cells presumably for the purposes of men further expunging all our roles bar sex and cleaning from history, but they can’t cure cancer or diabetes or infertility.

It’s like some sick, Frankenstein experiment, grotesque and depressing.
Should children result from this in some dystopian future then god knows how screwed up the world will be.

Still need an egg and a womb.

Just like surrogacy. We also don't yet know the risks of this... Short term or long.

How many eggs do you have to go through to get one embryo?

How many women get put at risk to still bring a baby into the world in this process?

All because some rich people want a vanity trophy.

It's not going to be available to anyone who isn't affluent...

Still going to need wombs to grow these 'motherless' babies in aren't they?

And even when they have created viable false wombs it will remain a tiny minority of people who would prefer this route over normal human reproduction

I don't think it should be happening but I don't feel particularly threatened by it. More disgusted.

As soon as they’ve mass produced the first sex robot, alongside this, we’re finished.

I’m only half joking.

Not just a womb. An actual mother. To grow up with.

They currently need a womb.
Unless they've got jars in the lab too.

Where’s the foetus gonna gestate, in a box?

Here's the BBC article on it from yesterday. It is not even close to being a workable process - because they have to artificially reduce the number of chromosomes in the skin cell from 46 to 23 before it can be fertilised by the sperm. Trouble is, those are just reducing randomly - any 23 are being removed, rather than one of each pair.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g2vyee0zlo

www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5419912-human-embryos-made-from-human-skin-cells?latest=1