The idea of artificial wombs may conjure up images of The Matrix and Brave New World. But it shouldn’t.
to the editors of the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. It was a response to a study on the successful use of an artificial womb with premature lambs. The letter writer, a physician, wrote at length of his concerns, including his fear that “it might replace the role of a woman in natural pregnancy.”
It is no wonder that people find this disconcerting. It’s the uncanny valley of pregnancy, too close for comfort: the most intimate bodily process almost, but not quite, reproduced. In NICUs today you’ll find a population of babies who are already partially gestated by technology: For the smallest babies, the first thing that usually happens in the delivery room is that they are intubated and connected to a ventilator. They are given nutrition intravenously at first, and then, if they do well, with a feeding tube that’s run down their esophagus. They live in an incubator, which keeps their bodies warm and their skin moist.
Matthew W. Kemp, a senior researcher on the study from Australia and Japan, explained it to me this way: “At the crudest level, if you can’t catheterize it and don’t have a fetal heart that’s strong enough to pump, that’s a hard limit. It’s really a hard stop, we think at 21 weeks, maybe a touch less, but certainly not lower than that.”
Today, in the United States, a fetus is considered viable if born somewhere between 22 and 24 weeks, though it depends on individual factors as much as gestational age. In that range, a premature baby has a chance. grew endometrial cells in her lab and then used that tissue as a scaffolding to grow mouse embryos. She hypothesized that she might be able to help people struggling with infertility as a result of implantation problems. It would be a bit like taking in vitro fertilization one step further and accomplishing implantation before transfer, then transferring the embryoendometrium into the patient’s uterus. After quite a lot of press coverage, Liu actually halted her experiments.
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