Article in The Times, could artificial wombs change the meaning of Motherhood forever?

[happydappy2]

Starts off as a story about the journalists personal sad story of losing a baby, after she had in infection early on in her pregnancy. Then slips in the line, this would mean that single men, gay men & trans women could gestate a child.

Basically removing the Mother entirely from the babies life.....

Is this best for the baby? Egg donation is not without risk, there was no mention of the dangers of this to WOMEN. Where are these men going to eggs from FFS!

Is this best for the baby?

Nobody ever seems to even consider this aspect.

I Haven’t seen the article but my understanding was that “artificial wombs” would be a more adapted intensive care pod for a pre-term baby rather than the whole gestation process happening in a lab? Does this journalist have a science background or is it just a naive leap to technology that doesn’t (and probably for many reasons couldn’t) exist?

I would agree with previous comments on these sort of subjects, when there are so many poorly understood reasons for pregnancy loss and infertility and how utterly amazing a placenta is and all the functions it performs, I just can’t see this happening. Surely it would be like having a patient on the most advanced levels of life support (ECMO, dialysis, blood products etc) for 9 months while expecting them to thrive and develop normally. I can’t see that ever being possible or an ethics body approving it.

It wont happen. Any transplants will end up as nothing more than a dead organ theyve had frankensteined to themselves which they use to fuel their breeding fetishes.

I had seen a few article about transplanted wombs. From this article if appears that there have been over 70 transplants worldwide including Turkey, The US and Sweden and eight births.

medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-women-transplanted-uterus-birth-miracle.html

I don't know what happen if you transplant a female organ into a male body, but assume that, with pregnancy hormones will require a lorry load of drugs. Not good for either parent or unborn child. Equally there are lots of artificial joints out there but not so many artificial organs. A womb capable of sustaining a pregnancy would seem one of the more complex.

Pumbaas Yes yr right, it would be a sort of life support bag for the final few weeks of pregnancy....this was in the Style section, so a bit of a fluff piece-the casual way in which she then said 'single men, gay men and trans women could gestate a baby' just jumped out at me as we now have this drip drip into our consciousness that men can produce babies with no mother needed.

Would they even be able to get the fertilised embryo in without surgery?

So many pregnancies end in miscarriage anyway and it wouldn't be possible to do a d&c to get it out.

So surgery to get the womb in, surgery for the embryo, surgery to get it out again either for miscarriage or c section on top of all the drugs required because babies are made from the mother's whole body.

It sounds like Sci fi and I'd be more worried about the push to remove the legal mother from the baby while there is so much child trafficking still going on.

I'm now of the opinion that they should give it a try, crack on and let them see how that works out. Maybe it's only when the bodies pile up that they might take pause.

I've seen Reddit comments where ftms are offering up their T soaked wombs to mtfs and everyone would be giving their consent and given the state of regulatory capture maybe it would get passed an ethics board after all.

I think that the surgeons will make money and it won't work. Meanwhile there will be quite a few dead babies and it will equate to live experiments on humans. With any luck some would end up in prison like that Dr who made 'three parent babies'.

Again more misunderstanding of what the female body is/dies.

The vagina isn't just a hole to stick a dick in..a womb is not the only thing involved in pregnancy.

Out whole bidy is designed for this. Our pelvis is a different shape. Hormones released in pregnancy actually loosen the joints to allow the baby to grown and our pelvis to shift slightly to accommodate our baby.

Babies grown inside a mother who has died don't even do so well. You cannot re create the environment. Babies can hear inside the womb. The feelings and the sounds etc all have a part to play .

It's a whole body process. You can't just shove a womb inside a man and expect it to work. You can't re create anything that resembles a womb and what it does and you cant re create the connections inside the body.

I think artificial wombs is referring to the concept of an external 'pod' that grows an infant from an embryo rather than womb transplants.

As someone said above any current development of this idea is likely to be around saving pre term babies rather than something intentionally sinister but as they say the road to hell etc...

Technology that meant people ( and I mostly mean men) could grow children in pods would be a human rights disaster if you consider all the heinous ways it could be utilised globally - trafficking, slavery, organ farming etc...

I doubt we actually have the capability to do it as yet, pregnancy is extremely complex with a multitude of factors that would require precise replication, many that science might not even understand.

I may have imagined it (and my expertise isn't up to the in depth bio chemistry and endocrine twiddles) but haven't there been cases where a fertilized embryo has managed to implant itself into the inside of the abdomen and begin growing ? Since the placenta comes from the embryo. not the mother ? Obviously in the normal course of events it would never survive, but it does hint at areas of research.

My (limited) understanding of sexual differentiation is that it developed from evolution as a way of better shuffling genes, and that all organisms started of from a single sex ?

Maybe I should have asked after some more coffee ?

If nothing else I noted that (and it's interesting to speculate what a male scientist would have deemed "better" ?) Professor Alice Roberts reboot of the human body (fascinating watch) made changing vaginal birth a top priority. Humans should be marsupials

I may have imagined it (and my expertise isn't up to the in depth bio chemistry and endocrine twiddles) but haven't there been cases where a fertilized embryo has managed to implant itself into the inside of the abdomen and begin growing ? Since the placenta comes from the embryo. not the mother ? Obviously in the normal course of events it would never survive, but it does hint at areas of research.

And the placenta continues to pump out the hormones which trigger the mother's body to pump out other hormones to sustain the pregnancy and prepare her body for labour and breastfeeding. Hence such ectopic pregnancies continue until the embryo grows big enough to cause the mother severe pain because of its inappropriate location, and can sometimes even survive - but can only be delivered surgically.

Technology that meant people ( and I mostly mean men) could grow children in pods would be a human rights disaster if you consider all the heinous ways it could be utilised globally - trafficking, slavery, organ farming etc

yep

although god knows parents don't always protect their children, they do generally protect and nurture them better than the state does. the outcomes for children raised by the state are bloody awful

intentionally creating a cohort of children without parents to protect them would be a disaster

When there are so many unexplored and underfunded areas of medical research/science, it seems like a monumental waste of time and resources to pursue this.

Shades of Brave New World and Never Let Me Go.

Imagine if, instead of wasting time and resources pursuing this ethically repugnant concept, the focus was just on growing organs. No more organ rejection or immune-suppressants. Restore or replace damaged or dysfunctional organs.

Celebrate and heal human beings as they are - not create harmful chimeras.

Saw this video on Twitter about these 'baby growing pods' . Gross. mobile.twitter.com/NaijaFlyingDr/status/1279053839799332866

It's transhumanist fantasy. Medicine doesn't even properly understand how pregnancy and fetal development works.

Artificial wombs are really better just intensive care for very premature babies, and as such will hopefully be saving lives in the not too distant future. There's no possibility of the technology that exists at the moment being implanted into someone, or of it being used for a whole pregnancy. That's journalistic exaggeration.

There was a good radio programme on this a while ago which was much more informative, but I'm struggling to remember the name of it.

(apologies in advance for the derail, hope you don’t mind OHJ)

With any luck some would end up in prison like that Dr who made 'three parent babies'.

OHJ did you mean He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who in 2018 announced he had helped to produce babies, whom he and colleagues had edited the genomes of, while at early embryo stage before implantation? He rightly got three years in prison and colleagues who helped got shorter sentences. I thought it was a very interesting case because of the absolutely disgraceful attitude to babies and women behind it.

Gene editing as a new research technique used in the lab only is fine and will hopefully give knowledge for helping to avoid genetic disorders. but gene editing is nowhere near being experimentally-tolerably ‘safe’ for use to alter the genetics of embryos and then to transfer them to the wombs of women to grow into babies. That is why what he did was so unacceptable.

The recklessness of transfer of those embryos to women’s’ bodies (impossible for any of them to give informed consent to!) and then the birth of twin girls Lulu and Nana and a third anonymous baby, is absolutely sociopathic by basic human standards. I would have to look it up but I think he recruited six women and there were also other pregnancies which ended in miscarriages. He could not have cared about safety of the women or the babies living their lives with needless genetic uncertainty. He claimed to be trying to make HIV-resistant babies- but the babies born would not have been at any additional risk of HIV than anyone else.

This case was deeply damaging to trust in science. Researchers in many places elsewhere in the world would never be able to use those techniques for reproductive purposes legally and also most would have a strong ethical training and enough human sensibility of their own to make them unwilling to try to make a baby at such a barely rudimentary stage of scientific knowledge.

This violation of patients also could have a chilling effect on other really important research that is valuable to patients.

Summary of what happened
www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/chinese-scientist-who-produced-genetically-altered-babies-sentenced-3-years-jail

more detailed article with fears of chilling effect on research
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00001-y

Really interesting long read article about who elsewhere in the world knew about this researcher’s plans and speculates on why He Jiankui did it: www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/untold-story-circle-trust-behind-world-s-first-gene-edited-babies

As for ‘three parent babies’, it’s journalists who have promoted that misdescription for dramatic effect. That’s a different technique to the gene editing one which is now in medical use in the UK to prevent a serious mitochondrial disorder from being passed on. But it doesn’t add any third (genetic) parent. It doesn’t interfere with the nuclear genome, which has the normal two parent genetic contribution. AFAIK there have been no prison sentences against the use of this technique because, unlike with the Chinese case above, it has not been rushed into human use to bring babies into the world before appropriate experimentation had been done. (Also science is global and international laws vary but that’s a whole other question)

Sorry for the massive derail..

Chatty that's really interesting. I am aware of a real increase of gay men wanting to use 2 women to create their children for them.....one to be harvested for eggs, another to gestate and give birth-this then muddies the waters in terms of 'who is the Mother' and gives the gay men possibly more rights. It is an ethical dilemma that doesn't seem regulated very tightly.

happy there are various threads on surrogacy on this board, sounds like you are maybe thinking about commercial surrogacy under contract, as they have in some states in the USA, as you mentioned the rights of the couple being greater than the woman’s? This thread from 53rdWay has various links in the OP which may be of interest: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3296286-Commercial-surrogacy

It’s hard to generalise about how surrogacy is regulated. it varies between countries from being banned, all the way up to legally binding contracts in favour of the intended parents being the legal parents at birth.
Men, women and couples and singles all use surrogacy, not just gay male couples:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3491073-And-so-it-came-to-pass-Mail-on-Sunday-gay-male-couple-offered-fertility-treatment-including-surrogacy

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3769869-Woman-asking-nhs-to-pay-for-US-surrogacy

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3594822-Guardian-the-rise-of-social-surrogacy

I read that article too, it really made me think. My first reaction was that, in the future, this could be used to remove women from the process of pregnancy and birth altogether. Which isn't good. But then I thought about women who are struggling with infertility, miscarriages etc and wondered whether this could help them too. And had lots of other thoughts around ethics etc - my brain was really whirring.

I want to see more good quality research into fertility, infertility remedies, conception, pregnancy, birth and the neonatal period to make the outcomes the best they can be for women and babies. I want more good quality research into contraception and abortion to make them the best they can be for women. I want more good quality human embryo research to benefit scientific and medical understanding for the benefit of everyone.

I think womb transplant research fits in as a part of that overall picture but with the clear understanding that this is only a technique that should ever be researched and used to benefit adult human females. Never men.

Only someone who doesn’t understand or dismisses the complexity of the whole female body’s contribution to successful, safe pregnancy could ever think it would be something a male human body could do.

Only someone with a pregnancy fetish who gives no shits about pointlessly and avoidably wasting human embryos and fetuses would ever think it it would be something their male human body should try to do.

I don't think uterus transplants should ever be done. Certainly never into men, but not even into women. AFAIK the only reason to implant a uterus is to bear a baby. The drugs that have to be taken by the recipient to prevent her rejecting the transplanted uterus are also taken by the foetus. I think it is deeply unethical to expose a foetus to unnecessary drugs in order to facilitate a woman's wish, no matter how heartfelt.

Growing (cloning?) a woman's uterus out of her own stem cells for implantation into her is a completely different matter, on a par with IVF. As there would not be any need to expose the foetus to anti-rejection drugs, there isn't the same ethical issue.

Good points Jelly, though in various situations we do already expose fetuses to substances or medical interventions that it would be optimal for them not to have been exposed to, for adult choice reasons.

So that feels a high bar to say no to uterine transplantation research, without evidence of significant harm to the fetus. Looks like there have been about 40 births from live uterine donation and one or two from uterine transplantation from a deceased donor. www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46438396
I wonder what follow-up there has been of those children?

Agree that there’s clearly a crossover between uterine transplant research and any other kind of transplant research and understanding how these drugs might interact with a fetus.

There also must be evidence around this from other types of transplantation, women taking anti-rejection drugs for other transplanted organs already do get pregnant and have babies. it would be important to look at how their babies do (assuming the anti-rejection drugs would be similar, I have no idea).

Fair enough. I can't pretend to have anything more than a layperson's knowledge.

But the majority of organ transplants are life-saving. Some, such as corneas and hands, are done to improve quality of life. Where would uterine transplants sit?

Uterine transplants seem to be on the very edge of 'just because we can do it, does not mean we should do it'.