Artificial Wombs

[irnbruguzzler]

Would we want these?

What would become of women if we had them?

The cynic that I am I don't see women surviving, except perhaps a few sexbots, without wombs.

I think that the way the world is at the moment it would be bye bye women in loads of places. And that would lead to real problems. Women would start getting kidnapped for sex and all sorts (well they do at the moment - but even more).

I can't see it ending well.

If we were living in a society like they have in star trek, or iain m banks culture, or claire's nights dawn one, then it would be different. But we're never going to get there, are we

yes I am a comic creation
Not really. I just have a hard time switching between the two internet worlds I frequent.
There's this one world where all these radical women shock me with their original and fascinating ideas, and there's this other world, the boring world, where people just repeat the status quo that men have invented. It's so boring. Let's throw a few new ideas around, at least.

I mean hate FFS.
That's what I'm talking about. You get men killing two women a week, But if a woman points out what men do, then she is the hater.

That goes to show just how hated women are, really, doesn't it. Women point out truth, and they are immediately accused of hatred, because what we must never do is draw attention to the fact that men do hate women, and this hatred is expressed in real, tangible, flesh and blood ways every day.

sorry, that "boring" quip was only to the "what about teh menzers" on here!

i will make sure to avoid you in the future sakura. i cannot care less if you find me boring

I have never met a man who is envious that women carry children and give birth to them.

DH would love to have a baby. Seriously.

It's unlikely to be the end of women, if such technology comes to be it would be expensive, time consuming and be a complicated procedure. It would not become mainstream and certainly not cheap enough for everyone or even most to do it. Since the parts of the world with large gender imbalances are not doing so through in vitro fertilisation (as in simply selecting the sex rather than leaving it to chance in the first place) I doubt newer technology would have much of an impact except perhaps for the really wealthy amgonst them.

Lol really Sardine?? My fiance is totally different - I'm due to give birth on Tuesday and am crippled with spd so he is very thankful he is a man right now!! :)

As for the artificial wombs, I agree with Coldtruth - they will be too expensive and pretty much pointless in most people's lives, especially in poorer countries. Just as some people thought sperm banks or whatever would lead to the demise of men and were proved wrong (most people still want a loving relationship and children within such a relationship) so this will be an empty threat too.

yes milobean

He is very keen on babies and children and would have loads if I would agree to it! I don't want any more due to various reasons (we have 2) and I asked if he would like to be pregnant and have a baby if that meant we could have another child and he didn't even have to think for a second! He is just very soppy really.

It couldn't work because all the babies ever incubated in them would be hideously dysfunctional.

A baby gets to know the smell, sound and feel of its mother from inside the womb. As soon as it is born, it turns towards its mother because it recognises her and she feels familiar, she's the only one the baby feels safe with.

You take away the space that humans grow in and you take away the basic psychological wiring of humans. The sort of babies who are incubated away from their mother's emotions - what sort of people would they be?

It's an interesting thought-experiment.

I feel very sorry for you Sakura as I cannot imagine what has happened to you in the past for you to view men in this way. Men like you describe are in a minority, but you have obviously had the misfortune to have come across them on more than one occassion

Hang on. When I went to bed last night (different timezone) bemybebe had just spilled her soul out on her problems holding on to her pregnancy, and you come back with a flippant comment about her 'boring' attitudes?

Really? That's the best you could do?

Bemybebe I'm sorry I didn't post last night - I was on my ipod in bed and thought I'd do it this morning. I am sending the stickiest feelings I can to you. xx

Ooh, that's an interesting point ER. I wonder if a baby in an artificial womb could even learn normally? Babies start doing the ground work of learning to talk in the womb (they learn to recognize the rhythm of their mother tongue).

I don't think it's wrong or OTT to consider the worst case scenarios with medical technology, sakura. Someone has to think about it.

MrsDistinctly, Sakura made it quite clear she wasn't address that comment to bemybebe.

Nope, sorry. That doesn't read like an apology to me.

Your comment about removing the emotions was really interesting ER - but what about those children born to a surrogate, who never see their 'mother' again? What about those thankfully rare cases where a woman is terminally ill and dies shortly after giving birth?

I don't think it could ever be an artificial womb 'in a box' so to speak.

Anyway, school run beckons.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but why does anyone need to apologize?

bemy made a very eloquent point and I can't begin to imagine how she feels.

This does not mean we should never consider the vulnerability of technology to abuse, IMO.

Sakura is not hateful or being a comedian (unless you think that the shit men do to women the world over is funny, Nesbo?)

I'm very sorry to hear of your bereavement and the difficulties you're facing, bemybebe.

Although I can understand why the idea of an artificial womb might solve certain individual women's problems, this would be a very dangerous development indeed for women if it were to happen under current conditions (i.e. where women as a class are systematically oppressed). It's not hateful to point out that women don't control the conditions of reproduction anywhere in the world, and that what rights some women have managed to win for ourselves have been meagre and are constantly under threat. It's just factual. Just look at what is going on in the US wrt abortion, for example.

And this is the thing isn't it, feminists who dare to point out stuff that actually happens in the real world, horrific stuff that men do to women, we get accused of being hateful or mad or 'funny'. But what is actually mad is the twisting of reality that's involved in hearing about a bunch of horrific stuff that one group of humans is doing to another group of humans with impunity, and then reacting not with horror and rage that these abuses are happening, but with anger towards the person pointing it out.

Sakura posts very extreme opinions so I don't see why she shouldn't be called on them. You can't expect to say things that are a very long way from the mainstream and not get a few wtf responses.

Artificial wombs are the province of science fiction right now and have been used in both worlds that might be considered feminist (or at least egalitarian) utopias and very scary totalitarian states. I imagine the outcome would be very different somewhere where women have very low status like perhaps rural China or India to places like Scandinavia where women and men have broadly similar lives and equal parenting is more expected.

I don't know any men that wish they could have been pregnant (and I have asked a few prospective dads). Personally I would have been very happy to share the experience with dh. I'm sure he would have enjoyed the puking, heartburn, waddling and general discomfort of pregnancy as well as the births. Not to say that there weren't some special things about pregnancy too, but it's not exactly a walk in the park. The act of creation is not the sole province of women in any case and wouldn't be unless we were capable of spontaneous cloning (another area Sci-Fi has explored).

Human egg cells have been made to divide as if fertilised by parthenogenesis so theoretically reproduction without a male sperm cell is possible. Also pregnancy can occur successfully outside the womb (I have only heard of one case of this) so I guess it could occur in males given the right hormonal environment & delivery by C-section, or possibly if a donor uterus was transplanted into a male. I think viable donor wombs are just around the corner, female-to-female.

I would like to think there could be a utopia where male & female were more equal if pregnancy & bf-ing could be made genderless, ie artificial wombs & artifical breastmilk, thus removing the expectation that most of the child rearing is done by females. In reality I don't know how this could ever be achieved in an acceptable way.

I don't think a donor uterus is currently a realistic prospect owing to the anti-rejection drugs that are required post-transplant, which make pregnancy far riskier even when the organ in question is not one directly involved in the pregnancy. The use of the uterus-donor's bone marrow might reduce the level of drugs required.

Growing one, or at least suitable muscle, from the user's stem cells for repair or replacement seems the only potentially achievable scenario.

"You can't expect to say things that are a very long way from the mainstream and not get a few wtf responses."

That's fair enough but this is the feminist board, which is a long way from the mainstream just by consistently and implacably declaring women's full humanity. This is the one space where we can discuss way out ideas and play with them and throw them around and see what gives. Sakura's right, people who come on here and say "OMG you are mad/ damaged/ crazy for discussing something that's outside my imagination" are really boring and not taking the discussion anywhere. She wasn't personally insulting anyone or trying to upset anyone by pointing that out. It would be very oafish of her to go over to a support thread and post sth like that, but this isn't a support thread is it, it's a feminist look at artificial wombs.

I think anyone who thinks there is any country in the world where men and women have a broadly similar experience of parenting, is kidding themselves. Scandinavia has some of the best conditions for women that's true, but it's still not on women's terms, it's still not equal, the pay gap hasn't bridged and rape still exists. In addition, women still don't own half the property or control half the companies or are half the judiciary or parliamentary representatives. I am always astonished by how ready women are to hand over yet more power to men on the basis that we've extracted a few rights here and there (which we can very easily lose again, btw - we have to fight bloody hard to keep the rights we've got, look at the recent onslaught on maternity rights and abortion rights just in this country, let alone anywhere else) we can rest easy and be comfortable that any piece of new technology controlled by men (because it is all controlled by men - look at the make up of all parliaments and judiciaries and medical controlling bodies if you don't believe me) will be used wholly to benefit women and has no sinister downsides at all.

Men as a class have form on how they've behaved towards women and are still behaving towards us and it is not mad to point that out and bring that experience into any discussion about handing over yet more power to them.

MrsDistinctly, a baby growing in a surrogate womb, is still growing in a human body so still has that experience of a normal human gestation.

I think we need to define what sort of wombs we mean and where they would be kept.

In other women's bodies? Ooh, that sounds fab for them doesn't it? I don't fancy walking around with an artificial womb in me with someone else's child in it that sounds like not an awful lot of fun for me. I suppose I might do it if I were really poor and desperate and had no choice or if someone else was controlling me though....

Sorry, busy day.

My previous comment about the donor/deceased mother was a supplementary to your comment Eleanor about babies instinctively turning towards the person who has carried them. When that bond is broken, for whatever reason, do you feel this leaves the baby potentially damaged too?

I do think this is an interesting conversation, but I do not like the negation of a real life woman's experience and opinion earlier in this thread. I consider myself a feminist but not at the expense of showing no empathy to another human being.