Bioethics scholarship considering the possibility of gestating an embryo to full term in an artificial womb (ectogenesis) often overstates the capacities of current technologies and underestimates the barriers to the development of full ectogenesis. Moreover, this debate causes harm by (1) neglecting more immediate problems in the development of artificial wombs, (2) treating abortion as a “problem with a technological solution,” bolstering anti-abortion rhetoric, and (3) presuming the stability of women’s reproductive rights. The ectogenesis conversation must consider anticipated uses of (...) the technology (neonatal intensive care) and acknowledge the immediate context (recognizing abortion as essential healthcare and existing reproductive inequities). (shrink)

In 2017, a Philadelphia research team revealed the closest thing to an artificial womb the world had ever seen. The ‘biobag’, if as successful as early animal testing suggests, will change the face of neonatal intensive care. At present, premature neonates born earlier than 22 weeks have no hope of survival. For some time, there have been no significant improvements in mortality rates or incidences of long-term complications for preterms at the viability threshold. Artificial womb technology, that might change these (...) odds, is eagerly anticipated for clinical application. We need to understand whether AWT is an extension of current intensive care or something entirely new. This question is central to determining when and how the biobag should be used on human subjects. This paper examines the science behind AWT and advances two principal claims. First, AWT is conceptually different from conventional intensive care. Identifying why AWT should be understood as distinct demonstrates how it raises different ethico-legal questions. Second, these questions should be formulated without the ‘human being growing in the AW’ being described with inherently value laden terminology. The ‘human being in an AW’ is neither a fetus nor a baby, and the ethical tethers associated with these terms could perpetuate misunderstanding and confusion. Thus, the term ‘gestateling’ should be adopted to refer to this new product of human reproduction: a developing human being gestating ex utero. While this paper does not attempt to solve all the ethical problems associated with AWT, it makes important clarifications that will enable better formulation of relevant ethical questions for future exploration. (shrink)

Many people believe that the abortion debate will end when at some point in the future it will be possible for fetuses to develop outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, would make possible to reconcile pro-life and pro-choice positions. That is because it is commonly believed that there is no right to the death of the fetus if it can be detached alive and gestated in an artificial womb. Recently Eric Mathison and Jeremy Davis defended this position, (...) by arguing against three common arguments for a right to the death of the fetus. I claim that their arguments are mistaken. I argue that there is a right to the death of the fetus because gestating a fetus in an artificial womb when genetic parents refuse it violates their rights not to become a biological parent, their rights to genetic privacy and their property rights. The right to the death of the fetus, however, is not a woman's right but genetic parents’ collective right which only can be used together. (shrink)

In a study published in late April in Nature Communications, the authors were able to sustain 105- to 115-day-old premature lamb fetuses—whose level of development was comparable to that of a twenty-three-week-old human fetus—for four weeks in an artificial womb, enabling the lambs to develop in a way that paralleled age-matched controls. The oldest lamb of the set, more than a year old at the time the paper came out, appeared completely normal. This kind of research brings us one step (...) closer to providing excellent quality of life for premature newborns, but it also portends major legal and ethical questions, especially for abortion rights in America. (shrink)

_Nomadic Subjects_ argues for a new kind of philosophical thinking, one that would include the insights of feminism and abandon the hegemonic mode that is conventionally adopted in high theory. Braidotti's personal, surprising, and lively prose insists on an integration of feminism in mainstream discourse. The essays explore problems that are central to current feminist debates including Western epistemology's relation to the "woman question," feminism and biomedical ethics, European feminism, and how American feminists might relate to European movements.

Traditionally reproduction, gestation and childbirth have all been regarded as being primarily a woman's domain. As natural reproduction occurs inside a woman's body, respect for autonomy and bodily integrity requires the pregnant woman to have the conclusive say over the fate of the embryo/fetus growing within her. Thus traditionally the ethics and law of reproduction is dominated by the importance of respecting women's reproductive choices. This paper argues that emerging technologies demand a radical rethink of ethics and law in the (...) area of reproduction. The creation and storing of embryos outside of a woman's body and maintaining a pregnancy in a brain dead woman's body and future possibilities such as ectogenesis and male pregnancy raise important issues that cannot simply be answered by appealing to the rights of women to control their bodies. There are those who argue that when reproduction or reproductive products exist outside of a woman's body each gamete donor should have an equal say over the fate of the embryo/fetus. Others, however, argue that giving an equal say to gamete donors in practice usually means allowing the male donor to veto the reproductive enterprise and this is unacceptable. As a result it has been suggested that women should be favoured when it comes to such reproductive choices. This paper examines both sides of this debate in order to answer the fundamental ethical and policy question: 'Is there any reason why women should necessarily retain control over reproduction rather than simply over their own bodies?'. (shrink)

Beginning with the premise that there is a fundamental biological inequality in the sexes, the author presents her classic blueprint for social revolution. Reissue. 25,000 first printing.

The benefits of full ectogenesis, that is, the gestation of human fetuses outside the maternal womb, for women ground many contemporary authors’ arguments on the ethical desirability of this practice. In this paper, I present and assess two sets of arguments advanced in favour of ectogenesis: arguments stressing ectogenesis’ equality-promoting potential and arguments stressing its freedom-promoting potential. I argue that although successfully grounding a positive case for ectogenesis, these arguments have limitations in terms of their reach and scope. Concerning their (...) limited reach, I contend that ectogenesis will likely benefit a small subset of women and, arguably, not the group who most need to achieve equality and freedom. Concerning their limited scope, I contend that these defences do not pay sufficient attention to the context in which ectogenesis would be developed and that, as a result, they risk leaving the status quo unchanged. After providing examples of these limitations, I move to my proposal concerning the role of ectogenesis in promoting women’s equality and freedom. This proposal builds on Silvia Federici’s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s and Selma James’ readings of the international feminist campaign ‘Wages for Housework’. It maintains that the political perspective and provocation that ectogenesis can advance should be considered and defended. (shrink)

This paper aims to address how artificial gestation might affect equality of opportunity for the unborn and any resultant generation of “ectogenetic” babies. It will first explore the current legal obstacles preventing the development of ectogenesis, before looking at the benefits of allowing this technology to control fetal growth and development. This will open up a discussion of the treatment/enhancement divide regarding the use of reproductive technologies, a topic featured in various bioethical debates on the subject. Using current maternity practices (...) in Western society as a comparator, this paper will conclude that neither naturally nor artificially gestated fetuses have interests that can conflict with those of potential parents who might want to use this technology to control fetal development. Such control may include selective implantation of embryos of a desired gender, deliberate choice of genetic traits, or maintenance of an ideal incubation environment to avoid fetal damage. Objections on the basis of disability as well as concerns regarding eugenics will be addressed. The paper will conclude that none of these objections are compelling grounds to prevent the development and use of ectogenesis technologies for the purpose of achieving specific reproductive goals, particularly when compared to current practices in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and selective abortion on the grounds of undesired traits. As such, when deciding whether to support ectogenesis research, the enduring interests of parents must be the primary consideration, with societal concerns regarding potential misuse the only valid secondary consideration. (shrink)

At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a (...) right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there is a right to the death of the foetus. Our strategy in this essay is to consider and reject three arguments in favour of this latter right. The first claims that women have a right not to be biological mothers, the second that women have a right to genetic privacy, and the third that a foetus is one's property. Furthermore, we argue that it follows from rejecting the third claim that genetic parents also lack a right to the destruction of cryopreserved embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The conclusion that a woman possesses no right to the death of the foetus builds upon the claims that other pro-choice advocates, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, have made. (shrink)

This essay critically engages the work of John Harris and Jürgen Habermas on the issue of genetic engineering. It does so from the standpoint of women's embodied experience of pregnancy and parenting, challenging the choice–chance binary at work in these accounts.

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's thinking advances and (...) deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought. (shrink)

The question "Where do we come from?" has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (_chora_, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of "matrixial/maternal hospitality" producing space and matter of and for the other. Irina Aristarkhova theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, (...) she applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question "Can the machine nurse?" is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. Aristarkhova concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

Reprogenetic technologies, which combine the power of reproductive techniques with the tools of genetic science and technology, promise prospective parents a remarkable degree of control to pick and choose the likely characteristics of their offspring. Not only can they select embryos with or without particular genetically-related diseases and disabilities but also choose embryos with non-disease related traits such as sex. -/- Prominent authors such as Agar, Buchanan, DeGrazia, Green, Harris, Robertson, Savulescu, and Silver have flocked to the banner of reprogenetics. (...) For them, increased reproductive choice and reduced suffering through the elimination of genetic disease and disability are just the first step. They advocate use of these technologies to create beings who enjoy longer and healthier lives, possess greater intellectual capacities, and are capable of more refined emotional experiences. Indeed, Harris and Savulescu in particular take reprogenetic technologies to be so valuable to human beings that they have insisted that their use is not only morally permissible but morally required. -/- Rethinking Reprogenetics challenges this mainstream view with a contextualised, gender-attentive philosophical perspective. De Melo-Martín demonstrates that you do not have to be a Luddite, social conservative, or religious zealot to resist the siren song of reprogenetics. Pointing out the flawed nature of the arguments put forward by the technologies' proponents, Rethinking Reprogenetics reveals the problematic nature of the assumptions underpinning current evaluations of these technologies and offers a framework for a more critical and skeptical assessment. (shrink)

This paper imagines what the liberatory possibilities of (full) ectogenesis are, insofar as it separates woman from female reproductive function. Even before use with human infants, ectogenesis productively disrupts the biological paradigm underlying current gender categories and divisions of labour. I begin by presenting a theory of women’s oppression drawn from the radical feminisms of the 1960s, which sees oppression as deeply rooted in biology. On this view, oppressive social meanings are overlaid upon biology and body, as artefacts of culture (...) and history. I then argue that ectogenesis should be pursued to replace two modes of assisted gestation that can be seen as outgrowths of oppressive assumptions about women's function, ectogenesis should be pursued to replace two modes of assisted gestation. These are gestational surrogacy and uterine transplant, which arise partly from gendered, pronatalist, and geneticist norms. These practices are supported by assumptions about women’s identity and value. Pursuing technologies such as ectogenesis, which weaken the presumed link between biology and gender, is beneficial to (trans-inclusionary radical) feminist aims, as part of a broad project of challenging dominant power relations resting on and maintaining gender categories. By allowing the conceptual separation of female reproductive function from ‘woman’, ectogenesis raises questions about how we determine who counts in this gender identity, and also how we value those who claim the identity ‘woman’. I conclude that ectogenesis has the potential to challenge traditional patriarchal family structures, and thence all other male-dominated structures (of work, education, cultural production), allowing a reimagining of the family and society in more radical ways than we have yet achieved. (shrink)

In the traditions of narrative ethics and casuistry, stories have a well-established role. Specifically, illness narratives provide insight into patients’ perspectives and histories. However, because they tend to see fiction as an aesthetic endeavour, practitioners in these traditions often do not realize that fictional stories are valuable moral sources of their own. In this paper I employ two arguments to show the mutual relationship between bioethics and fiction, specifically, science fiction. First, both discourses use imagination to set a scene and (...) determine a perspective. Second, bioethics and science fiction share the family resemblance of expressing moral beliefs. I then consider how understanding bioethics and science fiction as interrelated discourses can be the basis of a methodology for inquiry into relational autonomy in the context of biotechnologies and medicine. As an example of this methodology, I analyse Fay Weldon’s novel The Cloning of Joanna May (1989). (shrink)

The potential benefits of an alternative to physical gestation are numerous. These include providing reproductive options for prospective parents who are unable to establish or maintain a physiological pregnancy, and saving the lives of some infants born prematurely. Ectogenesis could also promote sexual equality in reproduction, and represents a necessary option for women experiencing an unwanted pregnancy who are morally opposed to abortion. Despite these broad, and in some cases unique benefits, one major ethical concern is the potential impact of (...) this emerging technology on abortion rights. This article will argue that ectogenesis poses a challenge to many common arguments in favour of a pregnant woman’s right to choose, but only insomuch as it highlights that their underlying justifications for abortion are based on flawed conceptions of what the foetus and pregnancy actually are. By interrogating the various interests and relationships involved in a pregnancy, this article will demonstrate that the emergence of artificial gestation need not impact existing abortion rights or legislation, nor definitions of independent viability or moral status. (shrink)

Throughout most of human history women have been defined by their biological role in reproduction, seen first and foremost as gestators, which has led to the reproductive system being subjected to outside interference. The womb was perceived as dangerous and an object which husbands, doctors and the state had a legitimate interest in controlling. In this article, we consider how notions of conflict surrounding the womb have endured over time. We demonstrate how concerns seemingly generated by the invisibility of reproduction (...) and the inaccessibility of the womb have translated into similar arguments for controlling women, as technology increases the accessibility of the female body and the womb. Developments in reproductive medicine, from in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to surrogacy, have enabled women and men who would otherwise have been childless to become parents. Uterus transplants and ‘artificial wombs’ could provide additional alternatives to natural gestation. An era of ‘womb technology’ dawns. Some argue that such technology providing an alternative to ‘natural’ gestation could be a source of liberation for female persons because reproduction will no longer be something necessarily confined to the female body. ‘Womb technology’, however, also has the potential to exacerbate the labelling of the female body as a source of danger and an ‘imperfect’ site of gestation, thus replaying rudimentary and regressive arguments about controlling female behaviour. We argue that pernicious narratives about control, conflict and the womb must be addressed in the face of these technological developments. (shrink)

Infertility can be an agonizing experience, especially for women. And, much of the agony has to do with luck: with how unlucky one is in being infertile, and in how much luck is involved in determining whether one can weather the storm of infertility and perhaps have a child in the end. We argue that bad luck associated with being infertile is often bad moral luck for women. The infertile woman often blames herself or is blamed by others for what (...) is happening to her, even when she cannot control or prevent what is happening to her. She has simply had bad luck. We focus on the self-blame of infertile women and show how it stems from pro-natalism that targets women. We also argue that overall for women, regret is a better moral response to infertility than self-blame. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The nature of two influential theories on the moral status of abortion logically commits them to welcoming the advent of ectogenesis as a solution to the abortion conflict. However, qualitative research into women's response to ectogenesis reveals that both women in favour and women opposed to abortion rights reject the technology on surprisingly similar grounds. The abortion framework which led women to reject ectogenesis as an ethical resolution to unwanted pregnancy is contrasted with the moral framework which shapes formal (...) ethical discussions of abortion. It is argued that the need for ethical relevance requires the views of ethicists to move closer to those of women [1]. (shrink)

Ectogenesis, the gestation of the foetus outside of the human body, will not for much longer be in the realm of science fiction; a number of projects attempting to develop ectogenetic technology are currently under way. This book examines the ethical implications of the development of ectogenesis. Examining the implications for abortion ethics in particular, this book also deals with the ethical objections to developing such a technology and the uses to which it may be put, such as creating embryos (...) to supply donor organs for transplantation. The development of the artificial uterus may well be similar to cloning: a sudden technological advance with dramatic ethical implications, thrust suddenly into the public eye. (shrink)