An illustration of a homunculus in a vial by Franz Xaver Simm, 1899.
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The removal of the female body from the process of human reproduction, a possibility imagined by generations of science fiction writers – from Mary Shelley, to Aldous Huxley, to Octavia E. Butler – may well be at hand. Or so says Christopher Inglefield, surgeon and founder of the London Transgender Clinic.
He has suggested that transwomen will soon be able to receive a uterine transplant and bear a child. Of course, patients would need to take artificial hormones and birth would have to take place by c-section, but otherwise, the procedure is “essentially identical” to that performed on natal women, since the “the actual ‘plumbing in’ is straightforward”.
It’s an optimistic prediction, to put it mildly. Worldwide, 11 babies have, to date, been born to mothers who have received uterine transplants. They have all been natal females with either a diseased or absent uterus, but an otherwise functioning reproductive system. The transplantation itself is challenging and only a small fraction of uterine transplantation procedures have so far resulted in a live birth.
This, though, starts to look easy when you compare it with the development of another form of reproduction technology: ectogenesis, or gestation outside of the body. Long a subject of interest for science fiction writers, now some researchers are hoping to make it a reality. In 2017, a team in Philadelphia succeeded in bringing a premature lamb to term inside what they called a ‘biobag’, which allows the foetus to continue developing outside of the mother’s body. The lamb was removed by c-section at the equivalent of 23-24 weeks gestation in humans, which is currently the cusp of viability for premature infants.
Some of the media reporting on the biobag, though, has been misleading. “An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep — and humans could be next” announced one headline, misleadingly. A human embryo can potentially survive in vitro for two weeks following conception, and the biobag might offer 16-17 weeks of artificial gestation at the very end. But that still leaves us with half of the pregnancy untouched.
Perhaps one day these two technologies will meet in the middle, and the human uterus might finally become redundant. But, for now, Adrienne Rich’s 1976 assertion remains true: “All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body.”
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SubscribeMore generally this alarming news reminds me of that oft quoted but excellent retort from Dr Malcolm in Jurassic Park; “…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should…”
What in particular alarms me is that there are so many aspects of the female body that have evolved for bearing children. Do we really know the full effects of blood flow, nutrients etc that in women would have been genetically/evolved part of their makeup for sustaining another life, that just won’t be the case in a male. What long term affects would this have upon a child grown in such a surrounding? You can’t just drop a V8 in a Nissan micra and expect it to run like a Jag to use a crude analogy.
Final point – but this article could do without the oblique victimisation of women – it undermines an otherwise good piece. You refer frequently to a desire to “remove the female body from the process of human reproduction” but do not substantiate how or why that specifically is the goal. I would hazard that it’s not even on the radar of those trying to achieve womb transplants and incubation machines. They don’t care, which is bad enough in itself but not deliberate.
I would suggest that this desire to “remove the female body from the process of human reproduction” is actually an unintended consequence of a certain very influential strand of feminism, which reduced biological sex to gender and sees everything as a social construction. The elephant in the room for this particular brand of feminism is of course procreation, because it is the one very obvious area where men and women are fundamentally and necessarily different, which makes a social constructionist view of the sexes impossible to uphold in its totality, and which refuses to allow biological sex to be reduced to mere gender. One might say that for some the goal as rather to remove the process of human reproduction from the female body.
Why stop at a man giving birth to a human baby? What if he and his gorilla companion want to give birth to a baby goat? The separation of human desires – however bizarre – from biological reality is another manifestation of modern Gnosticism (see today’s discussion under the John Gray article). What at first might have been liberating for women, now looks like liberation from women. Something for feminists to ponder
The whole “trans” movement is nothing less than a war on biology, and ultimately a movement to erase biological women.
Many believe, despite the lack of evidence, that doctors and scientists are our cleverest people. And yet, it is this group, or rather industry, which believes a healthy, normal and robust human being can result from artificial conception.
How can there NOT be negative effects from drowning a woman’s body in synthetic hormones to force the release of more eggs than can ever happen in nature, then, mechanically harvesting and moving those eggs to a petri dish filled with a synthetic copy of natural liquid, sorting through them, accepting and discarding, isolating and then forcing a sperm too weak to do the job into an egg, via a needle, where in nature the egg chooses which sperm to allow entry, and then storing, freezing, the results until, when required, thawing and forcibly implanting the fertilised egg into someone’s womb lining, possibly one with absolutely no DNA connection to the ‘egg,’ which has been prepared with more synthetic hormones….
And, not leaving it there, medication, vaccination will be delivered to the foetus via the ‘mother’ and finally the baby will be surgically removed and drowned in antibiotics which diminish immune function, already low because of the lack of a natural birth, and diminish brain function, and handed over to someone who possibly has absolutely no biological connection.
What is remarkable is not that alien process, but any sane adult believing it can be done without doing harm to all involved, particularly the artificially created child.
And here I thought the strongest impetus in society today was to make men redundant. Turns out it’s everyone.
First priority…… safety in pre and post natal care for mothers and their babies. We’ve only just made it safe to deliver babies by C section. Next step for a mother and her child is to ensure the child develops a healthy sense of its history and place in this difficult world. Hampering it with the bizarre experimentations practiced by scientists ” because they can” is tantamount to abuse. Life is tough enough without front loading it with experimental practices that will leave any resulting human wondering what the Hell they are. Have a good long look at maternity services in Shropshire and get it right for women and babies everywhere before working on design a baby projects in circumstances that are not natural for the nurturing of either viable foetus or subsequent children. the article describes a range of circumstances where individuals may imply that they have the right to create a child without considering the impact on any potential child, which should be the very first consideration.
” Every sperm is sacred”.
wise distribution is essential.
To reduce the gestation of a human to a set of physical parameters, which if met, would allow such a process to take place outside the female body disregards a whole major area of concern. It is only fairly recently in our neurological understanding that we began to unpack the concept of mirroring and its importance in the healthy psychological development of a young person ( or monkey in fact). The limbic region of the brain depends on interaction between child and mother ( or mother figure) to become securely attached.
It would be a complete surprise if there are not a myriad of interactions taking place between mother and child during gestation, which are triggering tiny but imperative developments for the emotional as well as physical well being of the future infant.