Tech Billionaires Propose Replacing Natural Birth With Synthetic Wombs

Ectogenesis Is Close to Growing Babies in Labs

Discussion of the merits of ectogenesis began long ago, in the 1920s. And it was not to save preemies.

In 1923 J.B.S. Haldane, an English biologist who was among the first to propose in vitro fertilization, predicted that it would revolutionize society. It would free women from the tyranny of reproduction and pregnancy. “With the fundamentals of ectogenesis in his brain,” he wrote, “the biologist is the possessor of knowledge that is going to revolutionize human life.”

The author of Brave New World , Aldous Huxley, almost certainly had Haldane’s ideas in mind when he described a world in which sex and love and reproduction were entirely separate. Babies are created in “hatcheries” and given a social and intellectual caste.

Like other speculations linked to genetics, ectogenesis became unpopular after the horrors of Nazi medical experimentation. People could see the dangers of raising babies in artificial wombs.

However, Shulamith Firestone, in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, revived the feminist element in Haldane’s vision of ectogenesis. She argued that the only way men and women would ever be equally powerful was to outsource pregnancy to “cybernetic machines."

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/ectogenesis-close-growing-babies-labs/or

See Brave New World Caste System

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