#EctoLife, the world’s first Artificial Womb Facility, which can incubate up to 30,000 babies a year.

[ItsLateHumpty]

This is concept only (I hope!) but I find it interesting the continued drive to divorce the mother-child dyad, and that some of the positive responses don’t seem to think of the massive harms this tech could do vs the very small upsides.

My fear is that even if this is a concept only now, it won’t stay that way because the seed is now planted (262k views) and the future looks terrifying.

(As an aside I notice all the babies are white)

Original tweet from Dev Khanna #CES2023 @ CurieuxExplorer

He has nearly 27k followers and his bio reads:

Digital Storyteller l Reimagining #brand #communication l #Technology Enthusiast l Inquisitive soul l #Metaverse #AR #VR #XR #SDGs #Sustainability #IoT #AI #ML twitter.com/CurieuxExplorer/status/1601487003195174913

The reply comments are interesting.

twitter.com/BowTiedRanger/status/1601687546316328960
“Watch this commercial for an artificial womb facility that aims to grow human babies in a factory.

Aside from assisted suicide, this is the most dystopian thing I’ve seen.”

twitter.com/LittleHardman/status/1601881873059352580
”This is a dystopian nightmare. When’s the asteroid due to hit?”

twitter.com/WassimAlAdel/status/1601931580049690626
”This could actually save so many premature babies if the uterus suddenly fails for any reason. Our firstborn was premature and for several weeks it was touch and go. I found myself wishing for something like this many times. So I say yay for technology”

This will never happen. Whoever puts their money behind this might as well throw it away.

Huxley was right in so many ways about humanity's peculiar urge to self-destruction.
I very much Hope it will never happen, but people are so very stupid.

It will never happen.

I'm sure all the wealthy billionaire backers of TRA ideology are pouring money into it as the end game in the scheme to replace us, but it's just not biologically feasible.

That’s fucking horrific.

Oh it looks just like The Matrix, what a surprise.

I read a book recently called Sex Robots and Vegan Meat which was about how technology could change four aspects of life (sex, food, birth, and death). It talked about these artificial wombs in the birth section and at the moment they are being developed as a better alternative for extremely premature babies - better replicating the womb to improve outcomes. The book was written a few years ago but at that point I think even the artificial wombs for babies born at 23/24 weeks were more concept than reality. Obviously if they did work, people would want to try and save babies born even earlier. The idea wasn't for big labs though, just that they'd replace incubators in hospitals.

The journalist who wrote the book did look at the idea that they could potentially be used for an entire gestation and that we could do away with pregnancy altogether and just have big baby labs but if I remember correctly the consensus was that that was so so far off the science we have at the moment that it was barely worth talking about.

Oh look, Brave New World's happened.

The next extremely expensive facility can be the one that picks up the pieces of all these successfully birthed and fantastically neurologically delayed and emotionally disturbed children and tries somehow to provide therapies (which in the UK are already swamped with years long waiting lists for the children birthed naturally) and find something to do with them once they're too old for school.

Because functionality won't be that high.

Who and how are we going to produce the slave class who are emotionally competent, socially competent, able to meet other people's needs instead of existing in a world of 'ME only, do what I say or I'll hit you', who are going to service all these dysfunctional people and run a country around them, keep services going, that kind of thing?

So terrifying. Of course it is incredibly difficult to argue against something that would better support premature babies but the long term implications here are horrific. I hate that society's response to the challenges of motherhood is to try to get rid of it all together. Because in a capitalist patriarchy that is preferable to just changing how society treats women and mothers.

Thankfully this sort of so called technology is the same sort of disturbed male fantasy as implantation of a womb into a male bodied person

In the absence of a "like post" button; LIKE.

This is the question that needs to be asked.

Interesting that one of the benefits highlighted is combatting falling birthrates in some countries. Surely providing accessible childcare, great maternity benefits etc would be a cheaper and easier booster?

I noticed that - surely falling birth rates aren't that much to do with actual pregnancy anyway, but all the stuff after like you've said. Saying it will benefit the countries makes it sound like the state would just order some future workers babies. Not sure who would look after them.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's brain went straight to Huxley's Brave New World!

The sci fi version is bad enough, let's hope this never becomes actual reality.

I saw someone recently announce that India might be trialing technology to replicate the uterus for saving late term fetuses and presumably premature babies.

And a trans person twisted it into something else.

Remember that thread where a regular name changer tried to convince us that growing a baby in a bag was just a few years away. But couldn’t acknowledge that the ethics committee dictating research on embryos and foetuses was nowhere near allowing that kind of experimentation.

It's a grift. I'd be willing to bet there are wealthy tw who'd be prepared to throw their money away invest in this.

Would it not be a simpler world plan to create ginormous reserves of sperm somewhere cold and continue with humanity being entirely comprised of women, using the sperm to have female children?*

*I'm joking. I love men and am growing some of my own.

I love men and am growing some of my own.

That's the sweetest thing I've heard all weekend. Hope the potting compost is good!

The thing is we've seen repeated ad nauseum: evil is shoehorned in on top of the heart rending. It's how it's done. That's how grooming works.

Can we have a country with really tall walls where the old farts who don't want to participate in this utter nightmare and the inevitable consequences can live? And not have to spend the next few decades being endlessly wailed at and expected to sort it out?

Well... I hope that the shed you have your lines of plug in incubators are warm in this cold snap.

And will you have enough to share around?

This is terrifying, and I’m really sorry but my mind instantly went to more nefarious reasons why people (men) might want to create a readily available source of babies/children who don’t have a family (mother) to protect them. ☹️

I read an article (think it was on the BBC) about something similar to this, a month or so ago. And droves of women in the comments saying oh this would be brilliant, giving birth is awful.

I thought, clearly none of you have read brave new world.

"A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and in a shield, the World State’s motto, Community, Identity, Stability."

And so it begins

This is terrifying, and I’m really sorry but my mind instantly went to more nefarious reasons why people (men) might want to create a readily available source of babies/children who don’t have a family (mother) to protect them

This is already a concern with surrogacy.

I just wonder so much about people pushing this idea. Haven’t they heard about the Romanian orphanages? People who don’t know anything about child development perhaps shouldn’t be designing baby factories, even fantasy baby factories. And even a rudimentary knowledge should make it obvious how evil this would be if the baby-growing technology actually worked.

Community, identity, stability

Bit of a chilling coincidence that it spells 'CIS'.

'The journalist who wrote the book did look at the idea that they could potentially be used for an entire gestation and that we could do away with pregnancy altogether'

I find it incredible that any woman in her right mind would choose to NOT gestate her own babies. In fact I'd go one step further and say unless a woman was prepared to carry her own child she shouldn't be having any at all.

MN caveat:
Obviously some (biological) women can't carry a baby full term and/or adopt but I'm talking about women who can just to stop anyone wailing about how I am insulting women who have trouble conceiving yada yada yada....

It's right there in the paedophile manifesto.

The main barrier for male people wishing to offend against children is female people, particularly mothers.