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A step closer to uterine replicators?
04-26-2017, 03:47 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... als-biobag
Artificial womb for premature babies successful in animal trials
Lambs born at equivalent of 23 weeks human gestation kept alive and developing in advance could transform outlook for very premature babies
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The possibilities for this technology and the implications are astounding.
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
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A couple of decades ago, I discussed the concept of the uterine replicator with some of my coworkers, pointing out the benefits, in particular the practically-negated risk of miscarriage. Without exception (granted, it was a fairly small sampling), however, those women I knew who'd borne children insisted that the experience had produced a special "bond" with the infant. They were certain that feeling wouldn't be there with children who came to term in the replicator rather than in their bodies ... and they also felt the replicator's improvement of safety for mother and child wouldn't be worth passing up on the bond.
I concluded — and I said this to the faces of some of them — that childbearing damaged the mothers' brains.
Thus, even after the technology matures, many of the people who stand to benefit most from it will nonetheless oppose it.
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
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To be fair Birr, despite what some might assert, a uterus manages to perform every necessary function to incubate a new life, and generally does so with excellent performance and minimal maintenance. All that's needed to supply the fetus is a slightly greater food intake. As such, barring medical necessity in those cases were miscarriage is a risk to mother, child or both, there's no need to use a uterine replicator, while the psychological factors on the side of the parents should not be discounted in child rearing. Given that, you know, the body does do a lot of things to the brain to make you want to take care of a noisy, messy pile of trouble that's incapable of attending to itself and will be incapable of attending to itself for the next decade or so at the very minimum.
And not just to the mother.
