“The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”

Here is this week's installment of my essay series on contemporary issues in bioethics. Heavy reading for a Monday morning, I realize, but hopefully worth the effort. Comments are always welcome.

Previous essays:

• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives”
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response”

This week's essay:

“The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”

Ectogenesis, used here to describe the development of a human being outside of a mother’s womb, may soon become a reality. In the past thirty years, for instance, incubators and related technological advances have drastically increased the threshold for the viability of premature infants outside the womb. More fundamentally, in recent years serious initiatives to create “artificial wombs” have achieved some significant successes. Dr. Thomas Schaffer has experimented with synthetic amniotic fluid which can sustain lamb fetuses, and more notably, Dr. Hung-Ching Liu has pioneered a technique to grow an artificial womb with cells taken from the lining of a woman’s uterus. [C.f. Christopher Kaczor, “Could Artificial Wombs End the Abortion Debate”? National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Summer 2005), p. 283.] Liu has even coaxed embryos to attach to the artificial womb’s “uterine wall” and begin developing. While many hurtles still remain (involving complex immunological and cardiovascular relations between the mother and child, for instance) it is not unreasonable to postulate that successful artificial wombs may exist within our lifetime.

The reaction to the prospect of artificial wombs among Catholic theologians is varied and often passionate. Some welcome the prospect as a possible solution to the abortion debate, while others warn that such technologies could inevitably lead to the “complete commodification of human beings.” [Steve Kellmeyer, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley in “Embryo Adoption: A Form of In Vivo Organ Donation?” NCBQ (Summer 2007), p. 267.] While a full treatment is beyond the scope of this essay, below are quickly summarized the other beneficial and negative consequences of artificial wombs commonly cited.

First, there are many potential beneficial uses for artificial wombs. They could give “surplus” human embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) the chance to escape their frozen status and mature towards birth. In the United States alone there are almost 400,000 frozen embryos. [A statistic cited by Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P.] Artificial wombs could provide an alternative to women seeking abortions that would preserve the life of the embryo, namely, placing them in an artificial womb. Kaczor has argued that this option could radically alter the nature of the abortion debate, since many proponents of abortion on demand, strictly speaking, claim that women have the right to evacuate a fetus, and not actually to directly kill it. [“Could Artificial Wombs End the Abortion Debate”? (Summer 2005), pp. 283-301.] In our time, of course, evacuation means the death of the fetus because there is no other suitable environment for it to survive. Again, artificial wombs could provide a “safe haven” for ectopic pregnancies (where the embryo cannot naturally develop in its mother’s fallopian tube) and for instances where the mother is unable to support the life of the embryo because of uterine cancer, disease, poisoning or other complications.

Artificial wombs, at the same time, present many moral difficulties. Kaczor has compiled eight objections. Of these, here are several of the most relevant: artificial wombs are extreme technological means of replacing an intimate human function. Christine Rosen says [here], artificial wombs “represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body” since they could be used in conjunction with IVF to completely divorce the human mother and father from the act of bringing about new life. If embryo transfer is morally impermissible (a topic still disputed among theologians), then it would be immoral to transfer an embryo to an artificial womb. Furthermore, for all but the gravest reasons, a human embryo should not be deprived of the unique personal shelter offered by its mother. In accordance with Church teaching (for instance, expressed tangentially in Donum Vitae), artificial wombs deprive the embryo of its right to be born within and as a result of a human act of intercourse, and of its right to experience an integrated maturation from conception/gestation through natural birth within its mother’s womb. Also the scientific experiments that would lead to the production of artificial wombs could be gravely unethical in their intention (rendering human generation artificial), and means (IVF). Other objections of a sociological, political, psychology and theological nature could be formulated.

As an addendum, it is important to note that even though the prospect of functional artificial wombs is very likely far in the future, nevertheless, the utility and benefit of discussing the moral implications of the technology are already attainable. Simply speaking, while artificial wombs may in actuality “represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body” in rational debate they also completely abolish the concept of “viability” as a claim for legitimizing the death of pre-born human beings. Thus, far in advance of a future hypothetical where the abortion debate could entertain the possibility of artificial wombs as a real alternative to abortion, here and now the proponents of on-demand abortion must face the fact that “viability”, with each succeeding technological breakthrough, is more and more obviously demonstrated to be a relative scientific measurement which cannot in any valid way be used as a criterionfor establishing the metaphysical or biological status of human personhood.

Artificial wombs, in this sense, reveal the true humanness of a natural womb’s occupant. +++