Sounds like any widespread use is still a ways out if we're in the "setting rules for trials" phase now, but I'm curious what impact artificial wombs would have on abortion laws in the US, if any.
The non-religious aspects of the abortion debate partly hinge on this idea of fetal viability (specifically, the time at which most fetuses have a high chance of survival outside the womb), and I could imagine artificial wombs bringing that viability threshold down a bit. Which then opens the door to a whole other debate about whether terminating a pregnancy could (or should) involve transplantation. I know some current bioethics argue that abortion is currently permissible because the death of the fetus is merely a side effect of terminating a pregnancy, rather than its goal...
Artificial uteri may expand the range of fetal viability, raising questions about the role that fetal viability plays within abortion law. Within severance theory, for example, abortion rights only include the right to remove the fetus, and do not always extend to the termination of the fetus. If transferring the fetus from a woman's womb to an artificial uterus is possible, the choice to terminate a pregnancy in this way could provide an alternative to aborting the fetus.
its really leads to all sorts of question. when markets for eggs and sperms to be sold directly to interested (the layman) are there and the buyer funds the rent of the artificial womb and the food/nutrition + bio conditions. will he be the father or the owner? if more over the buyer have a farm (so to speak) of wombs?
> This already exists just with surrogacy as there are both egg and sperm banks available to those who need them.
True, and if you saw what played out during COVID you'll realize there is a massive market for this: during COVID healthy, viable sperm supply outstripped supply significnatly, and the market dynamics went into effect. Some so brazen as to advertise on FB to do so [0].
Surrogacy continued to thrive during COVID and was only hampered because of the Russian invasion, it is hoime to perhaps one of the biggest fertility/surrogacy countries on Earth. Lots of children were born during the war and have not been reunited with their families yet, either.
It's one of the many stark and bleaker parts of the War and ultimately about the Human Condition that make me think that while we are likely inching closer towards a Brave New World situation, with all the dire implications that go along with it, that when it comes to fertility this might be the best of all bad solutions.
Personally, I have chosen to delay having children for what will likely be another decade, after not following in my parent's or siblings footsteps of having children in their 20s. Its a conscious decision but ultimately a forced one: namely political strife, environmental factors and climate change are at the forefront but there are more. And seeing fertility rates absolutely crater in the 21st century in anything but the most economically dire of places (namely Africa and India) I think having the framework ahead of the device might be wise as we will have to eventually kick-start a new baby-boom in order just to reach a semi-parity as millennials like myself enter as the larger cohort with similair delays in childbirth--I''m an outlier in having children, most of my friends over 30 just don't even want children if they haven't already had them.
I mean, this regulatory effort, centered around rules for trials of artificial wombs for use as NICU alternatives for very-premature infants, don’t really raise that issue; they would basically be medical gear like incubators (but, presumably, only get approved if thet offer an improvement in outcomes.)
ppl can already have arbitrary amounts of kids either in a nuclear family setting or “spreading their seed everywhere”. given they’re still responsible on paper, but that doesn’t stop someone from doing it in the first place
I'm wondering what the legal ramifications would be if parents refused to pay for the completion of a gestation in an artificial womb.
Can the lab force the parents to pay the costs and have the child anyway?
Can the lab terminate the pregnancy? Would they run afoul of abortion laws?
If the lab completes the gestation, are they the guardians of the child? Is it an orphan, and ward of the state? Can the company request reimbursement?
> I'm curious what impact artificial wombs would have on abortion laws in the US, if any.
EDIT: Holy cow, this post got way, way longer than I expected.
The first step in the analysis is that, since no abortion law has been enacted by the US government, each State has its own set of abortion laws. Because killing a person is clearly illegal, the legality (not morality or ethics) of abortion hinges on when a developing clump of cells becomes protected under the law.
States have severe disagreement on that point. For example, consider the state of Georgia. The following is their definition of a person:
> There are two classes of persons: natural and artificial. “Natural person” means any human being including an unborn child. Corporations are artificial persons. They are creatures of the law and, except insofar as the law forbids it, they are subject to be changed, modified, or destroyed at the will of their creator. Unless otherwise provided by law, any natural person, including an unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat, shall be included in population based determinations. As used in this Code section, the term: “Detectable human heartbeat” means embryonic or fetal cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the heart within the gestational sac. “Unborn child” means a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb. [2]
By law in Georgia, the status of personhood applies to a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb with embryonic or fetal cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the heart within the gestational sac. The preposition "in the womb" clearly indicates a womb present in a human being, as it doesn't say "in a womb." As such, I do not expect legal personhood will automatically extend to a human being gestated in an artificial womb in Georgia.
On the other hand, consider the state of Massachusetts. The very beginning of their code is:
> All persons who are citizens of the United States and who are domiciled in this commonwealth are citizens thereof. [3]
Now, does the state of Massachusetts define in the state code what a "person" is? As far as I can tell, no, they don't (if someone else knows better, please chime in). A ballot initiative is trying to do that right now [4]. It seems that what constitutes a person in Massachusetts is less clear than in Georgia and is more a function of general consensus in society. As such, it's possible that a human being gestated in an artificial womb in Massachusetts would have legal personhood, and it's also possible that legal personhood is granted by governing authority. It's difficult to state.
What about at the federal level? The US code speaks on personhood as follows:
> [For the federal government], the words “person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual”, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development. As used in this section, the term “born alive”, with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion. [1]
At the federal level, the status of personhood is attained when an infant homo sapiens is completely removed from his or her mother.
So, by these laws, abortion becomes murder in Georgia after the heartbeat of a homo sapiens in the womb is detected, in Washington DC when an infant homo sapiens is completely removed from their mother, and in Massachusetts...well, it's complicated. Because the attainment of personhood is unclear, it's unclear precisely when abortion becomes murder. As such, Massachusetts specifically legislates when abortion is and isn't permissible without reference to personhood [5]. EDIT: In Wisconsin, before Roe and now post-Roe, abortion is murder.
So, on artificial wombs, based on current laws, I'd wager: Georgia will say you're not a person, Massachusetts will be the Wild West, Wisconsin says you're a human being but not born alive, and the federal government says you're not a person.
In my personal opinion, clear definition of legal personhood is the best approach, particularly because personal rights under the law stem from recognition as a legal person. From there, it becomes simple to state the precise conditions of when a clump of cells gains legal rights, be that at conception, presence of heartbeat, or live birth.
This is obviously hypothetical and should not be done, but I wonder if an evil company could exploit Georgia's laws to set up artificial womb farms and produce non-person human beings who exist solely as property. Georgia could easily prevent this by explicitly banning artificial wombs.
I believe these FOUR (not three, see edit) perspectives capture the essential elements of artificial womb legality across the USA.
EDIT: I kept doing some research, and Wisconsin's perspective distinct from those three:
>[Concerning an abortion]...“unborn child" means a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive. [8]
> Live birth: In this subsection, “breathes" means draws air into and expels it out of the lungs one or more times. “Live birth" means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother, of a human being, at any stage of development, who, after the expulsion or extraction, breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, a cesarean section, or an abortion, as defined in s. 253.10 (2) (a). [6]
> An individual who undergoes a live birth is born alive. If a statute or rule refers to a live birth or to the circumstance in which an individual is born alive, the statute or rule shall be construed so that whoever undergoes a live birth as the result of an abortion...has the same legal status and legal rights as a human being at any point after the human being undergoes a live birth as the result of natural or induced labor or a cesarean section. [The preceding] may not be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract a legal status or legal right that is applicable to a human being at any point before the human being undergoes a live birth. [7]
Wisconsin doesn't designate personhood like Georgia does but instead says a human being comes into existence at conception and is born alive when undergoing a live birth or born during a failed abortion procedure. Note their "live birth" definition's alignment with the federal government's. However, an artificial womb in Wisconsin may create a situation where you're a human being but never born alive, meaning the definition of "unborn child" is not satisfied, meaning you can do anything you want to a human being created in an artificial womb.
Interestingly, the long-existing Wisconsin definition of "unborn child" was unworkable under the Roe v. Wade paradigm.
> The text of the Georgia statute you cited only uses detectable human heartbeat as an example ("including"), not a requirement for personhood.
Yes, an unborn child is as you state, but the state will count an unborn child in "population based determinations" only if the heartbeat is present. That's a big threshold, and it's my understanding that abortions in Georgia may be freely performed if no heartbeat is present, so it's in effect stating "no heartbeat = no personhood".
> This would seem open-ended enough to apply to individual eggs.
Hmm, not sure about that one. The definition of "unborn child" is not met if the gestating egg is not "in the womb."
> > This would seem open-ended enough to apply to individual eggs.
No sources here cuz I just got home and I'm tired, but I swear there was some press recently(?) about IVF clinics fretting about egg storage/disposable for exactly this reason. I don't remember if anything came of it, but I think some IVF technicians were worried about going to jail if they, for instance, forgot to put an unfertilized egg back in the freezer and it went bad.
And then when you get to fertilized but non-implanted embryos, of course, that's when the "life begins at conception" crowd starts having their say.
Those IVF technicians seem a bit paranoid. Obviously, forgetting to put an unfertilized egg back in the freezer will hurt trust in your business, but I can't imagine anyone could successfully sue the IVF clinic on the basis that an illegal abortion had occurred.
The issue of fertilized but non-implanted embryos is already well-understood, as that is the entire basis behind opposition to embryonic stem cells and derived products. The interesting part will be to see how various religions will react if you tell them the fertilized egg will grow in an artificial womb.
There's a finite demand for babies to adopt. In a world where it was easy to transfer a few-week-old fetus to an artificial womb as a back-up method of birth control, the supply of babies would exceed demand. That would be a bad situation.
No, the right to abortion is not hinged on "fetal viability", it's "can the state force someone to undertake a medical procedure". Slapping "fetal viability" just means "can the state force someone to undertake a medical procedure to save someone else's life".
Very simply, every "a fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is no different from "if a person needs a kidney or they will die, and you are a match for that person, then you are required to give them your kidney".
Adding an artificial womb to this does not change that. All that changes is what medical procedure is being forced.
Artificial wombs would allow people who for whatever reason are unable to get or remain pregnant, to have a child without having a surrogate involved. It does nothing more than that.
[ed: just noticed I'm replying to a throwaway account. Real great how these pro-birth commenters aren't willing to back their statements with their actual accounts]
> It changes that instead of killing a person you can carry the pregnancy to completion even if the mother wants to kill her unborn son/daughter.
If you can donate a kidney, and not doing so results in a person dying, there your decision not to kills them. More to the point, no one can force you to give up your kidney against your will. What you are saying is very clearly that the state should be able to just that.
> Hopefully in the future we can extract them from the womb and put them in an artificial womb instead.
Hopefully we can just force people to have a different forced medical procedure unlike the current one. After all, they're just women, it's not as if they have rights.
Also: embryos aren't people, the burning building test is really simple. Say a building is on fire, and you're running to escape and you come across a room containing a child and a load of fertilized eggs. Do you have to hesitate about grabbing the actual child?
> Very simply, every "a fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is no different from "if a person needs a kidney or they will die, and you are a match for that person, then you are required to give them your kidney".
Not sure if you're intentionally referencing Judith Jarvis Thompson's most famous (and in my opinion, greatest) essay with this comparison, but yeah, this is a common metaphor. The sick violinist and all.
But I think you may be discounting the role of viability too quickly, both in theory and in practice: in theory, because some bioethicists (I can't remember if JJT specifically falls into this camp, it's been a while) draw a distinction between terminating a pregnancy and actively destroying a fetus. They'd argue that it's fine to remove a gestating fetus from your body, but not so fine to tell the doctor performing the d&c "and make sure it's good and dead afterwards!" Under current medical practice, there's no practical difference between removal and "killing," simply because it's impossible for an underdeveloped fetus to survive outside the human womb... for now... dot dot dot...
And in practice, because fetal viability is often used to draw abortion boundaries in more permissable jurisdictions who don't restrict it outright. "Late term abortion" is a complicated issue, probably ill-suited for this forum, but viability is generally why you can't abort a healthy fetus three weeks before its natural due date.
It's worth noting the idea of "late term abortion" because that's an easy choice is super dismissive and harmful to the people who undergo it.
A late term abortion is something that happens by someone who intended to, and presumably wanted to, carry to term. Pete Buttigieg had an interview on the subject in which he rightly pointed to the fact that in the context of "late term abortion" we're talking about a case where someone (or couple) are intending to bring a child into the world, and have likely chosen a name, arranged a room, got clothes and such lined up. For such people the choice is unlikely to be easy or desired, just the least awful of myriad terrible options, in which case why should state legislation be involved? Certainly the state has no involvement on removing life support from others, why is it involved here? (Let's look at the Schiavo case where conservative politicians tried to force a husband to keep his dead wife "alive" because with sufficient technology that was "possible")
This is a bit disingenuous. "A fetus is a person and the state should force it to be carried to term" is generally not the argument, the argument is "A fetus is a person and you should not be allowed to actively kill it."
If you can donate a kidney to save someone's life, and you choose not to, you have killed them, by your definition.
Alternatively, say you donated blood, and that blood is used to keep someone alive. Then they run out of that blood and need more, and you are the only option, but you've developed anemia or something, so no longer want to donate blood, by your own definition the state can now require you to keep giving blood anyway: This person is only alive now because of your actions, and your attempt to change those conditions would kill them.
Also the policy is "you should be forced to carry it to term", because abortion bans also come with a variety of bans on access to emergency contraceptives that would prevent it from even getting to the point of being a fetus in the first place, and the women-aren't-people crowd fight anything and everything else that would prevent many abortions occurring in the first place (access to contraceptives, actual sex ed, etc)
I mean, under current circumstances, "not allowed to terminate the pregnancy" does work out to "be forced to carry the fetus to term," because those are the only two outcomes here. Which is why artificial wombs throw an interesting wrench in things by suggesting the possibility of terminating a pregnancy while maintaining fetal development (and there's still a whole host of questions about whether forced artificial womb transplantation is ethical or ideal).
It would be neat if we could find a way to gestate a child in artificial wombs a bit longer, maybe from 9 months to 18 months to have a more developed baby at birth and skip some of the more annoying early months. Then parental leave could really feel more like a vacation to spend time with your child doing meaningful stuff, instead of getting no sleep taking care of an eating and shitting, noise making creature.
> Then parental leave could really feel more like a vacation to spend time with your child doing meaningful stuff, instead of getting no sleep taking care of an eating and shitting, noise making creature.
The comment is a dismissive way to put it, but I find it a conceptually interesting idea, considering that, because of the limitations of our hips, human babies are arguably premature births compared to most other mammals.
It’s only for use as alternative to standard treatment on extremely premature patients in neonatal intensive care units, not something out of Vorkosigan saga or Dune if you only read the first few books.
It’s the first step toward commoditizing human life, in a way that isn’t dependent on some Marxist analysis of capitalism. Maybe some think that’s fine, and that having designer children is “good”.
I agree, though we're past the first step. Massachusetts has been trying this through The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program which would see prisoners trade jail time for body organs [1]. Probably inspired by China's forced organ harvesting [2]. Not to mention that commoditizing human life has been happening through things like human trafficking [3], or surrogacy which exploits poor women [4]
1. Prisoners owe a debt to society, that’s certainly one way to repay it, provided it’s voluntary. Same reason I’d support voluntary prison labor.
4. You could argue being a sex worker is far more exploitive of women. I think it’s not our place to say they can’t do that, as long as it’s voluntary.
I hope you realize that what you are advocating for in both of those cases leads to the exploitation of the poorest classes. You may want to read the article I cited for Point 4 to see why this is a really bad idea (and also the DHS infographic I posted). Not only are you advocating for the commoditization of human life, you are asking for the creation of an organ harvesting industry. Does this not violate any ethical standards you have?
Human reproduction is at or over the limits of what is possible: our heads really don't fit through our pelvii anymore. The trajectory of our species and our genus has been going in the direction of brain enlargement, so it would seem only natural we use that brain to enable evolution of the brain by changing our strenuous births. Remember, there's a ton of science and experience involved in keeping mothers alive already. It is only natural to make the next step.
Designing kids and/or producing (for capitalistic purposes) them seems orthogonal to artificial wombs to me: that requires other things besides merely a couple who ask a hospital to fertilize their egg with their sperm and place it in a device.
One concern is that standardized use of this would seriously risk making humans go extinct in the future.
If we completely remove the selection constraint that humans are able to reproduce, over time functionality bugs will creep into that area. If, at any point in the future, society collapses to the point where we are no longer able to build these machines, we may no longer be able to reproduce and will simply die off.
Maintaining this constraint on humans seems prudent. If and when we can manipulate genetics well enough to fix the issue in the actual human organism in a way that is not fragile, then that would be fine.
And yet if you look at the birth of any other animal, their birth is way, way easier.
My wife has wide hips but our daughter couldn’t make her way through and needed a c-section. Maybe she could have made it after another 18 hours of labor, or maybe not.
>...our heads really don't fit through our pelvii anymore. The trajectory of our species and our genus has been going in the direction of brain enlargement ...
I'm interested in reading more about this trend. But whatever the data, it does not sound "natural" to take that phenomenon and apply a mechanical solution to the problem. Taken to its logical conclusion, human reproduction becomes dependent on the availability of these mechanical interventions. That sounds like a really bad idea, at least to me.
>Designing kids and/or producing (for capitalistic purposes) them seems orthogonal to artificial wombs to me: that requires other things besides merely a couple who ask a hospital to fertilize their egg with their sperm and place it in a device.
It may sound that way, but needing a woman to gestate the new human is a barrier to this activity. Celebrities and the uber-wealthy, in some cases, already essentially rent the reproductive systems of ostensibly willing women for this purpose. Having an artificial means do to this would remove that barrier and significantly expand the market, so one proceeds from the other.
Why don't we just build the experience machine if features of our nature are burdens to be discarded at the earliest opportunity? It is not obvious that a life devoid of any hardship should be the ultimate goal of technology. Some of you are way too quick to discard core aspects of humanity out of some bastardized concept of the good.
Not sure if I should respond, but are we really debating if preventing someone from experiencing the risks and pain involved in pregnancy and childbirth is a bastardized concept of “good”? Should we remove the option for women to receive epidurals, lest they get to miss out on a “core” aspect of humanity?
What other kinds of pain and risk do you think people should be subject to?
FYI, evolution does not care about the wellbeing of the individual, nor is there any inherent reason the mechanism that evolution comes up with should be held up as the ideal.
Childbirth is not just some miserable medical procedure. The entire event is a pair bonding activity for the parents and child. Deleting that because it makes you uncomfortable is unwise.
The above list does not even include hemorrhoids that require a hemorrhoidectomy or retained placenta, both which require an operation where the mother has to go under anesthesia.
I'm gonna guess that you're not someone who can personally get pregnant, or else you might be signing a different tune on this one, lol.
Childbirth is remarkably dangerous, even under current medical standards. Even a successful natural birth tends to bring a whole host of complications afterwards, and it's not unreasonable to want to avoid that.
Let me be uncharitable here: do you really think a mom would love her baby any less just because she rip open her entire perineum in the process of pushing that baby out? (If so, I guess I have bad news for C-section babies...)
My daughter was born via c-section. I'm well aware of the complications. Childbirth is not "remarkably dangerous", this is a modernist haranguing of women that is meant to scare them. It's a natural process, and like any natural process sometimes things go wrong or not perfectly. That doesn't mean the process is worthless and we should get rid of it.
I'm pointing out that the same phenomenon where "parents" of children born via surrogacy feel less of an attachment to their child would be present in the AWT situation.
>Should we remove the option for women to receive epidurals
This is an example of how the concept of the good has been bastardized, the idea that if a little bit of X is good, a lot of X necessarily is better. No, that it is good to get rid of the excruciating pain associated with childbirth does not imply getting rid of all the discomfort associated with childbirth is good. Our concept of good has been totally untethered from anything concrete; it has become nothing more than an abstract quantity to be optimized to maximum effect. But we don't stop to ask ourselves if getting rid of core human experiences is what we should be aiming for.
>evolution does not care about the wellbeing of the individual
Evolution doesn't care about the well being of the individual, but the individual has been optimized to find well being in the kinds of environments our ancestors evolved in. These environments included pains, hardship, pathogens, risk, uncertainty, etc. Using technology to decouple our lived experience from anything resembling the natural environments we evolved in can and will have detrimental side-effects. Technology is great in that it can potentially let everyone have the chance at a meaningful and fulfilled life. But we've gone so far beyond that, and we're seeing the results in the various diseases of modern life. We need to rethink our approach.
> getting rid of all the discomfort associated with childbirth is good.
If you are framing the process of childbirth as discomfort, we will simply have to agree to disagree. Discomfort is stubbing your toe, or sleeping in an uncomfortable position and getting a frozen neck.
Narrowly focusing on the potential complications of childbirth is missing the bigger picture. Taking pregnancy out of the human experience significantly changes the human experience. Such a change is not without consequences and shouldn't be done lightly, and certainly not due to "burdens and risks".
Everything humans do is due to “burdens and risks”, with the explicit goal of changing the human experience.
Without progress, the human experience involves a ton of maternal and infant mortality. And obviously everything has consequences, good and bad. These are not reasons to freeze the process of birthing a child to a specific point in time.
There's a difference between incidental experiences and features that are definitive of what it means to be human. The process of pregnancy is definitive, infant mortality is not. Just because we have eliminated one class of experiences to good effect does not commit us to an unquestioning march of "progress".
The issue is that a lot of people, primarily technologists in my estimation, just don't like the human experience all that much. They'd like to do away with it as much as possible and replace it with a sanitized and mechanical experience instead.
Ok, but so what? We can agree that some people will be upset if some things are genetically curated. Is that an argument for a blanket ban against genetic curation? Because I think it’s weak as hell.
I’m arguing for it. I’m also literally doing it. So… again. What is your point? Is your point that some people will be upset if something is true? Because that’s generally always true.
> Well if we swap "genetic curation" with "eugenics" I think you'd be hard pressed to stand up in front of a group and argue that in 2023.
Because we're a generation of snowflakes and I'd recommend to get a better set of friends you can talk freely about stuff.
People are so scared of being branded racist or nazi that common sense goes out of the door.
You're performing eugenics or selective breeding when you select a partner to have children with.
People with different ethnic backgrounds will have different characteristic and of course you want to maximise the chances of success for your kids.
Balancing them out (often by mixing races) and granting both parents advantages to the kids is the optimal solution.
For example, I got strong hairs from my dad and a dark skin from my mom so I'm not bald like relatives on my mom side and I can stand in the sun for way longer than my dad could.
What's wrong with that?
I'd say we're genetically predisposed for doing that already, without access to information.
Eg. I always liked blonde pale girls who are the polar opposite of myself
People already choose the color of their babies, either by choosing their sexual partner or by choosing what egg/sperm donor they use. How could it possibly be otherwise, government mandated IVF with randomized donors?
I think people are not really aware of the current state.
You can pick the sex of your kid too with IVF to the extent that if you have male and female embryos successfully extracted and frozen you can choose which ones to use.
Artificial surrogacy and "designer children" are two different, somewhat orthogonal concerns. Most IVF today involves no genetics modification. It's always been a slippery slope argument that surrogacy "inevitably" leads to genetically designing children.
Artificial wombs would certainly change the economics of surrogacy, but it's also a bit of a slippery slope to think it would commoditize it. It doesn't change most of what we know about IVF and likely keeps the same (relatively high) costs, it maybe just disrupts the labor market for surrogacy. (Which today from what I hear is an extremely expensive market prone to shortages.)
> You're the one that's imagining that AWT leads to leaving the solar system.
That's not what I said. Technology is not a singular set of advancements to the next. As usual, nothing but bad faith responses. Good luck with whatever.
Until we fully understand all of the processes in morphogenesis and hormone changes in prenatal development (hint: we don't), I see this pursuit as reckless at best. Furthermore why are we pursuing this in people when the "artificial womb" that happened with sheep was shaky?
The process of setting out regulatory rules including ones on what the criteria are that need to be met for human testing to be allowed?
Seems to me that you've actually pointed to the reasons that, given that the technology is being pursued by industry, rulemaking is necessary, not premature.
Surrogacy for now is cheaper. Generally the trend with automation across many industries is that it becomes cheaper in the long run with more predictable/controlled results.
At some point in the future, it will probably seem quaint and sort of primitive to grow humans inside of other humans - as well as rely upon random sperm and ovum selection. Why live with the inconvenience and increased risk when there are safer and easier ways to do it with more predictable results.
In fairness, Brave New World also did it back in 1931: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World. None of this is new ideas just that technology is catching up to science fiction.
Dolly the sheep was the first clone (who survived). But her life was significantly shorter than a natural sheep, and I understand end of life diseases but hard. In other words there is good argument to be made that Dolly's creation / birth was unethical.
Now multiply that about a thousand fold for this awful idea. We have no idea what the complex interplay between womb and foetus is, hormone and other signalling between mother and baby.
I know this is a tiny step, but really. Don't any of these people watch movies ? You know how bad this will get ...
Humans are story-telling apes. Human culture is transmitted via stories and movies are a vastly powerful widespread story telling mechanism.
Yes, movies are our guide. They are probably the most powerful of means to how we find the common set of rules and norms - the "culture war" is not some silly side argument, it is people looking for battle lines in defining the cultural norms of the 21C.
Hollywood and Bollywood and xxxwood will play enormous parts in that.
tbh its for the best, abortion/birth control/sperm banks already made "a man" useless (not men, just any individual man). It would just have the same effect on women and then we can move forward with the complete commoditization of m/f intersexual dynamics.
The non-religious aspects of the abortion debate partly hinge on this idea of fetal viability (specifically, the time at which most fetuses have a high chance of survival outside the womb), and I could imagine artificial wombs bringing that viability threshold down a bit. Which then opens the door to a whole other debate about whether terminating a pregnancy could (or should) involve transplantation. I know some current bioethics argue that abortion is currently permissible because the death of the fetus is merely a side effect of terminating a pregnancy, rather than its goal...