Wired Mesh

A Farewell to Wombs

There are neo-Luddites who remind us of our own hubris, and carefully warn of the unseen dangers of new technology. Then there is Gene Veith.

Yes, the author of Postmodern Times is back with an exciting new argument in World Magazine: Scientists are busy engineering "the technological obsolescence of motherhood."

All, right now, settle down. Let's have everybody stop laughing and take a look at his article. I'll give you a minute to compose yourself.

Veith's topic is the approaching availablity of artificial wombs, which may become a viable medical option in less than a decade. A quick Internet search shows that different teams of scientists are developing distinct types of artificial wombs, but Veith focuses mainly on the work of Yoshinori Kuwabara at Juntendo University in Tokyo, perhaps in part because Kuwabara's work just sounds so creepy. According to The Guardian, "his team has removed foetuses from goats and placed them in clear plastic tanks filled with amniotic fluid stabilised at body temperature." (As a side note, you'd think Kuwabara could have taken five minutes and found a less disconcertingly symbolic creature; at this rate, why not just title the research "Project 666" and terrify everybody?)

The purpose of Kuwabara's project is not in fact to creep everyone out with bionic goats, but to create an artificial womb that could support a baby to term if its mother's womb becomes a hostile environment. Other research teams, which Veith also notes, are working to create wombs from a mother's own endometrium (womb-lining) cells, so that previously barren women could in fact conceive, and the artificial womb be placed inside the mother's body after the most dangerous phases of the first trimester. These two types of wombs combined, most experts agree, will likely lead within the next six years (There's that number again. Damn.) to an artificial womb that can support a child for the entire term of a pregnancy.

Veith doesn't much like this. He notes that it could be a boon to pro-lifers, since unwanted babies could now be supported outside their mothers (he doesn't note that it's also good for gays, for the obvious reasons, but maybe that's just as well). But then he comes to the core of his argument, a bright shining place where paranoia mates with illogic. Let us journey there now.

"This may well be perceived as the ultimate medical victory. Just as medicine has cured many ailments and mitigated so much human suffering, now there will be a cure for the pains of childbearing. What woman would voluntarily choose the discomforts of pregnancy and the suffering of labor when her baby instead could simply come out of a machine?"

Well, I don't know, Gene... how about all of them? This is a fascinating argument, because it seems to be coming from a man who has never actually met a pregnant mother. I feel confident saying this because at least 50 come through my office every day. Most of them have pregnancies that range from merely painful to excruciating. And all of them, with a few drug-addict exceptions, are madly in love with the child inside them. They have been since they first saw the little pink dot on the pregnancy test. They are enduring tremendous difficulty for the sake of child they love without having seen. To suggest that any woman would prefer that her baby be born in a plastic pod is to completely ignore the mystery of mother-child bonding. It is the argument of somebody who spends too much time with men.

On the other hand, many of these women would be thrilled to hear of an artificial womb, not because it would make their lives easier but because it might save the life of their child. Working for a perinatologist for just four months, I have quickly become amazed at the many ways that a mother's womb can become literally poisonous to her baby. Just last Thursday I photographed an amnio exchange, a procedure where a chillingly large needle is inserted into the womb to drain out the amniotic fluid and replace it with clean saline, simply because the baby had developed in such a way that the amniotic fluid had become deadly to it. These, Gene, are the mothers that could benefit from artificial wombs -- not those who lack love for their babies, but those who grip their husbands' hands while giant needles are plunged into their stomachs, in the hope that it might help save their children's lives. But moving on...

"Women would be obsolete. Their all-important power to engender and bear children would be transferred to a machine, liberating them from motherhood and handing feminists a huge victory."

Let us pause for a moment and consider the mind-boggling stupidity of this paragraph. If women stop getting pregnant, they won't matter anymore. I always wondered where the person's essence was located: was it in the head, the heart, or perhaps somewhere more ephemeral? Now we know: the most "all-important" part of a woman, at least, is in her genitals. The editors of Maxim will be pleased.

It would be nice to say that this is a view held by Veith alone. But according to Dr. Scott Gelfand, of Oklahoma State University, "Some feminists even say artificial wombs mean men could eliminate women from the planet and still perpetuate our species. That's a bit alarmist." (A bit?) And yes, it looks like at least some feminists are happily bouncing about the room at the thought that their sisters are free from babymakin'. One, with the endlessly fascinating moniker Shulamith Firestone, wrote some time back that "pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species. Moreover, childbirth hurts and isn't good for you. At the very least, development of an option should make possible an honest examination of the ancient value of motherhood."

The problem with Firestone, of course, isn't that she's a feminist. The problem is that she's a jerk. And the same thing goes for those writers who fear that men will create artificial wombs, store up a good collection of eggs and then set about the task of beating all the women they can find with big sticks until they're all dead. This is gender power-struggle as an all-encompasing worldview, which is the sort of thing one can expect from people who have grown to value tribal power over any other human experience. But it isn't what one would expect from a Christian, who is supposed to see people as more than the sum of their gender identity. For Veith to assume that such fringe views of humanity are the necesary path of this technology suggests that he once again is out of touch with what most people think about life.

"The family would also be obsolete. Sex has already been divorced from procreation by birth-control technology and a popular culture that has promoted sex as entertainment sensation apart from the family. Already, sex is not even necessary for procreation, as a test tube and a petri dish can work just as well to conceive a new human life. Finish the baby up in an artificial womb, and pop it out when done. Children could be manufactured, in the numbers needed, by the state, which could raise them in specially designed schools. Who needs the family at all?"

It's good to see that Gene Veith made it through middle school and read Huxley with the rest of us, but that doesn't excuse him from having to prove that there are actual cultural trends that will take this technology to such a dystopian end. Are Americans, to use our own people as an example, completely uninterested in creating families? Does the dichotomy between sex and procreation mean that people are no longer interested in procreating? And what in the name of George Orwell inspired Veith's absurd leap to state-controlled birth and child-raising? Is he just trying to get a rise out of paranoid homeschool moms, or does he actually think that Hillary Clinton is plotting somewhere to take the child from parents and give it to a government village? Has the man gone completely insane?

Again, as a Christian, Veith should be able to state with some comfort that there are some things so elementally ingrained into humanity by their creator -- things like the family, say -- that some plastic box isn't going to destroy them. Such dystopianism seems, at best, a little at odds with his faith.

"Technology tends to hand us double-edged swords. Pro-family groups might use this particular sword as a weapon against mass abortion, but it can also be used to cut up the family once and for all."

And my purchase of a pair of scissors could mean that I'm planning to stab somebody in the eye tomorrow afternoon. But simply stating a worst-case scenario isn't the same as making an argument that such horrible visions will come to pass. Gene Veith hasn't made any such arguments. He's just blithering.

The most frustrating aspect of uninformed, abstracting writers is that they distract us from what's really at stake. Gene Veith is right that the gifts of technology are always laced with new dangers to our bodies and our souls. The trouble is that he doesn't have a clue what any of them are. We should be concerned that artificial wombs won't be able to replace the nurturing, heartbeat-laced environment of a mother's body, and that such a loss could have severe effects on a baby's development both physically and psychologically. And we should worry about the increasing potential for designer babies for the richest of couples, and what such tinkering might do not just to our children, but to our own souls. It may be, in fact, that such dangers are so great that the technology of artificial wombs should be rejected outright.

But to make that decision, you have to understand why people would want such a technology. And in the vast majority of people, the desire is simple: they want to have their own beautiful, healthy children, and their bodies won't let them. It doesn't take a lot of heavy thinking to comprehend this, and knowing it makes the choices facing us at least more practical. Gene Veith won't understand artificial wombs until he spends a little time with the hopes and dreams that go into the real ones.

Posted by mesh at October 28, 2003 01:54 PM | TrackBack