The brave new world of artificial wombs

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take place within a test tube, and incubators have pushed back the earliest time when prematurely born infants can survive outside of the womb. We can edit genes and modify animal organs for successful implantation into human beings. We can grow meat from cell cultures, and we can clone vertebrates.

For all the talk one hears about a dearth of innovation, the pace of biotechnological innovation has only accelerated since the end of the twentieth century. It will not soon stop.

Artificial wombs are a feature of science fiction dating back to Huxley’s Brave New World and no doubt sometime earlier. The technology doesn’t exist yet, but there is already a market demand for gestation outside a conceiving mother’s womb, a demand that is met by surrogacy.

But surrogacy creates legal and emotional complications. What if the birth mother doesn’t want to give up the baby? What if a girl who knows full well that neither Pete Buttigieg nor his husband gave birth to her wants to develop a relationship with the woman who did?

Many Americans, including most conservatives, view hormonal contraception — the pill — as a revolutionary development.