Motherless child

[Angela]

Hey, you scientists out there: has there ever been a case of a fertilized human egg being brought to full baby-hood without ever having set foot in a uterus? Test-tube, start to finish? In other words, is it necessary to have an actual woman involved, outside of the ovum-producing function? Is this something science is even concerned about achieving?

I wonder if conception-challenged couples would prefer to have a baby without having to use a surrogate womb.

[ahimel]

I don't believe this has yet happened, partially because of laws regarding research with human babies. I've kept track of the progress on this front, because I hope to see a uterine replicator (my term for such a procedure/device, from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series) in my lifetime.

The problem is, it's unlikely that we'd be able to do it correctly on the first try. And it's illegal to experiment with it, so we'd have to do it correctly on the first try.

The closest I've seen is an experiment discussed by William Saletan here. Two seperate teams have managed to grow a mouse fetuses through two seperate stages of development: one can grow it about halfway to maturity (birth) and then implants it in a live mother. The other grows it in a live mother about halfway to maturity, and then is able to grow it outside the womb all the way to 4 days short of viability (the fetuses had to be "discarded" at that point, to avoid legal repercussions.) So theoretically, we should be able to take a mouse egg and a mouse sperm and grow a mouse.

Therefore, theoretically, we should be able to do the same with a human. But fertility lobbies in some country are going to have to make the research legal first.

UPDATE: Just found this article on wikipedia.

[Angela]

Wow! From the wikipedia info, it sounds like the overwhelming ethical considerations might make it unlikely to happen soon, even though the scientific progress has been astonishing!

I would sign up for the program of growing my baby in a nice artificial uterus, no contaminants, no need to worry about falling down the stairs, and best of all, I could watch my baby grow while enjoying a nice chardonnay!

[ahimel]

Those are the main arguments that Bujold puts forth in the Vorkosigan saga. Your bad habits can't affect your child, your risk can't affect your child, any medical treatments that may need to be done can be done easily, plus there's essentially no risk of childbirth complications (like dying).

And on the abortion front, most people are really for it. Pro-lifers like that it could save lives, and pro-choicers like that it broadens choices.

But on the cloning front... it's a whole different (and more complicated question). IMHO, we could just pass laws granting equal status to cloned children (they're alive, they're people, they get citizenship, etc.) Anyone who wants to take responsbility for creating an entire person may do so the cheap way (sex) or the expensive way ($100,000's in medical costs before the child is even born.) But maybe I'm missing a critical loophole.

I'm also not sure if the pro-abortion, anti-cloning, anti-gay movement (to broadly characterize the US far Right) has cottoned on to the fact that a uterine replicator would allow homosexual couples to have children. Could be another bar to getting it legalized.

Anyway, still rooting for the fertility lobby.

[Angela]

...and don't forget the Right Wing's desire for women to bring forth children in pain and sweat, as punishment for ... I forget what.... original sin or something.

Can you imagine how panicked Rush and Jerry would be to know that women could simply grow their babies in a petri dish using who-knows-whose sperm, meanwhile getting up to all kinds of no good behavior?

[spirited]

People (scientists, doctors, everybody) used to believe the same thing about formula. They thought our breastmilk was way too contaminated nowadays and urged everybody in the seventies to switch to formula because it would be much better. It is now well known that, even with all those contaminants and less than ideal eating habits from the mother, breast milk is far superior than formula in every way. I think it is reasonable to assume that wombs are better environments for children than incubators.

[Angela]

Spirited, since you bring up the analogy of breast milk, you know that not every mother is able or willing to breast feed. The ones that are unable or unwilling are currently not forced to use a wetnurse; instead they can choose to use the scientific advancement known as formula, regardless of whether it's judged inferior.

In that regard, maybe mothers who are unable or unwilling to gestate or use a surrogate will eventually have the choice of using an artificial uterus.

[stephencp]

"In that regard, maybe mothers who are unable or unwilling to gestate or use a surrogate will eventually have the choice of using an artificial uterus."

How easy do we want to make it to have a child? Perhaps we could also have some kind of government sponsored day care (and night care) for those couples (or individuals) who don't have the time or the means (or the desires) to actually raise them either.

Stephen
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[Angela]

Stephencp -- exactly! did I mention that the ethical considerations were overwhelming?

But to answer your question: any society that makes it difficult for people without time, means, or desire to have an abortion would be clever to be ready with government-sponsored day care and night care, as you so wrily suggest! I'm only speaking practically, not morally, mind you. Preaching abstinence and/or contraception doesn't seem to stop 'em coming!

[ahimel]

Originally Posted by stephencp

How easy do we want to make it to have a child? Perhaps we could also have some kind of government sponsored day care (and night care) for those couples (or individuals) who don't have the time or the means (or the desires) to actually raise them either.

The uterine replicator wouldn't make it easier to have a child. Right now it's so easy that untrained, unskilled morons can do it. All you have to do is have sex, and keep having sex until a large lump in her belly prevents sex. Then, after 8.5-9.5 months, scream and push a lot until a kid comes out. If that fails for some reason (miscarriage, stillborn, premie) try again. It's painful, it's unsafe, but it's not difficult.

Under the new model you have to make a fully concious decision, because you have to take actions that are non-instinctive. You have to find a person willing to partner with you, and convince them that it's a good idea. You have to go to the doctor and have gametes harvested. You have to pay the doctor to combine them. You have to pay for 8.5-9.5 months of medical technicians watching your replicator. And then you still have all the mess of trying to actually raise a child.

Odds of two teenagers doing this accidentally...or a married couple doing it accidentally... or of one of the couple trying to create a child without the other's knowledge/consent.... are significantly lower, because it's a significantly more difficult thing to carry out.

[Brutha]

I would think that it could be legal to do such a thing in a state like South Korea.
Sooner or later it will become possible to do such things.

[Future's Origin]

I wonder if there would be any unforseen consequences for the child. In the later months of pregnancy, the baby is aware of the mother. It can hear the heart beat and some noises outside of the womb and feel movement. Some people feel that they can sense the mothers emotional state. This is why putting a baby up to your heart, or rocking it in the same rhythm of walking comforts an infant. Swaddling also mimics the confining womb and provides comfort,. Who knows what a baby learns about being human while in utero. Perhaps you could mimic the confines of the womb and add an heart beat and timed rocking, but it seems that you'd never be able to completely recreate a natural pregnancy. A specialized plastic tub is not a human being. It seems that there would be a great potential for psychological ramifications. I would not be willing to use my genes or child for such an experiment, and I would most definitely not want to be the first person born into the world this way.

[ahimel]

Originally Posted by Future's Origin

A specialized plastic tub is not a human being. It seems that there would be a great potential for psychological ramifications. I would not be willing to use my genes or child for such an experiment, and I would most definitely not want to be the first person born into the world this way.

Or even a metal tub. But I'd still like to have the option available. An incubator isn't a human being either, but a couple of my friends wouldn't be alive if not for having one available.

My younger brother died when my mom had a seizure while she was pregnant. She was only 4 months along, so it was too early for an incubator, but a uterine replicator might have saved him.

[Future's Origin]

I don't think an incubator is quite the same thing. Incidentally, some people have reason to beleive that long periods in incubators have negative psychological effects. But obviously, it's better to be alive in the first place. Using a false uterus to save a miscarriage is an interesting idea and a good application. I'm not morally opposed to the entire idea. I just think that often, science assumes that it already understands everything about a natural process when it tries to duplicate it synthetically. There may be many important events and necessary nutrients, human contact, etc. that we may not be aware of yet that are needed for successful and compete development. Personally, I wouldn't want to be part of the experiment, even if it would mean not having or losing a potential child.

[Matthew Shea]

The first thought that entered my head when reading this thread was "this sounds a lot like The Matrix".

Honestly, I think it will be a sad day indeed when a woman gives up her natural role of childbearing in favor of an incubator. She will have then become functionally, biologically obsolete.

[Angela]

Originally Posted by Matthew Shea

Honestly, I think it will be a sad day indeed when a woman gives up her natural role of childbearing in favor of an incubator. She will have then become functionally, biologically obsolete.

Someone still has to produce the egg, don't forget. I don't think science is anywhere near creating egg or sperm from scratch.

[Brutha]

Someone still has to produce the egg, don't forget. I don't think science is anywhere near creating egg or sperm from scratch.

Fertilization of an egg is possible without sperm, in a science labor today.
But producing eggs is more difficult, or we wouldn't have that stem cells debate.

[Angela]

What?!? No sperm necessary? So it's MEN who are obsolete!
Seriously, what are you speaking of? I've never heard of a human egg being fertilized with no sperm. I don't believe it!

[Matthew Shea]

Originally Posted by Angela

What?!? No sperm necessary? So it's MEN who are obsolete!
Seriously, what are you speaking of? I've never heard of a human egg being fertilized with no sperm. I don't believe it!

Exactly... ...and do women really want to head down that road too? Test tube fertilization was the first step, the topic of this thread is the next big one. Artificial eggs will be the final nail in the coffin. Remember that just because it's not possible TODAY doesn't mean it's not possible at all.

IMHO we shouldn't be messing with reproduction any more than is necessary to understand it's workings.

[Angela]

Originally Posted by Matthew Shea

Test tube fertilization was the first step, the topic of this thread is the next big one. Artificial eggs will be the final nail in the coffin...IMHO we shouldn't be messing with reproduction any more than is necessary to understand it's workings.

Whose coffin? What exactly gets killed by exploring these possibilities? Why shouldn't we be messing with reproduction more?

Matthew, please know that I'm not advocating the use of artificial eggs. (I might choose to use an artificial uterus, though, if it were available.) I'm just trying to wrap my mind around ethical objections to scientific advancement -- I don't exactly understand them. Would you expound, please?

[openeyes]

Originally Posted by Matthew Shea

The first thought that entered my head when reading this thread was "this sounds a lot like The Matrix".

More than that, it reminds me of Brave New World. An era where everyone is a test tube baby and parenting is institutionalized (no more nuclear family, just children raised by professionals) is becoming increasingly possible, though not so likely anytime soon.

[Guinevere]

For me, it's sad that so much is invested in trying to create an artificial uterus for creating new life (which I regard as quite different than an incubator for saving already existing lives) while there are millions of children there hoping for loving parents to adopt them.

[Matthew Shea]

Originally Posted by Angela

Whose coffin? What exactly gets killed by exploring these possibilities? Why shouldn't we be messing with reproduction more?

Matthew, please know that I'm not advocating the use of artificial eggs. (I might choose to use an artificial uterus, though, if it were available.) I'm just trying to wrap my mind around ethical objections to scientific advancement -- I don't exactly understand them. Would you expound, please?

Angela, I totally understand where you're coming from, but one of the main problems that I see in society today is that we (we=society, this is not directed at you) don't think things through before we do them. I think we need to ask ourselves why we're doing things. Is this purely for the sake of scientific advancement without regard for the consequences? What practical implications will there be? What are the pros and cons? How do we mitigate the negative aspects of this? A lot of these questions don't have answers yet and should be thought through more.

For example, I thnk it can be strongly argued that if science were to be able to clone human sperm and ovum, it would open the door to scientific research on human embryos that would involve things doctors would never do to a viable baby and would end with the embryo or fetus being destroyed. Do we want to play around with human life in that way? Is there enough benefit to society for this to be worth the costs? If we did nothing, would society really be any worse off? What if we just let evolution run its course?

These questions all need answers and it would be far better to have these debates now and establish guidelines than to try to react after such things become reality. I'm not against scientific advancement, but I am against progress purely for the sake of progress without considering the implications, especially when there are clear human and societal costs involved.

[Matthew Shea]

To add to what I said above, any time we're doing something that relates to human life, health, liberty, happiness, etc, etc. we need to first define the problem, then find the solution, not vice versa. A lot of things today seem like solutions in search of a problem (Iraq war???). When we state a percieved problem, the scope of the problem also needs to be considered. In other words, is this problem really worth solving? Another way to word it would be: how much of a problem is this, really? Also, does your proposed solution really address the root cause of the symptoms you're seeing?

For example, it was mentioned that a good reason for artificial wombs would be that the baby's development wouldn't be affected by any of the mother's bad habits. But let's ask ourselves if an artificial womb would really solve that problem. If a mother doesn't love her unborn child enough to make some temporary sacrifices in her life, will she be prepared for all the additional sacrifices she will have to make once the child is born? Are we making this too easy? For that reason, I think it's clear that not even the bad habits are the real problem. Our outlook on life is what could use some adjusting for if we approached pregnancy and childbirth with the respect it deserves and truly did what's best for the child, bad habits that affect the baby would be a non-issue.

[ahimel]

The Consequences of Scientific Research
Historically, society is really bad at predicting consequences anyway. I don't think it's a recent development for a society to do things without thinking -- I think it's entirely possible that the only time in the entirety of human history that anyone in a vaguely leadership position actually sat down and tried to do good for society and consider the consequences was when the Founding Fathers created the US constitution... and even then, they weren't trying to predict consequences. They started from the basis that they could not predict what would happen in the future, and designed a system that, although its creators could not possibly have foreseen automobiles, nuclear bombs and personal computers, has nonetheless managed to handle cars, nukes and PCs pretty well.

90-some-odd percent of patents never make it to market -- even the ones that seem like really good ideas. Some of the biggest changes in the world came from things that seemed pretty small at the time -- an analog input device for the computer, to supplement the keyboard, or a couple of computers that CERN scientists taught to talk to one another so they could share data.

Sometimes what is predicted to be the end of life as we know it drops into society without a ripple and is forgotten. Despite the invention of the printing press, the popularity of the waltz, women's suffrage, women's lib, the invention and availability of condoms and birth control pills, legalization of abortion, and the election of a professional wrestler to the US congress, society today looks an awful lot like society in the middle ages: men and women get together, make a lifelong commitment to each other, have sex, and raise kids. Some do it well and some do it badly. Some make it through 50-80 years together; some kill each other in the first year.

So I'm unconvinced by an argument that we "shouldn't" pursue a line of research because of the dangers it "might" have. You don't know the dangers, and I don't know the benefits. The only way we can find out either is to keep learning. If we determine that the dangers are greater than we'd realised, we take steps at that point to limit the specific dangers about which we have definite knowledge; I find it difficult to believe that the uterine replicator will be more dangerous to society than the A-bomb.

The Dangers of Solutions Looking for Problems
Likewise, the problem with insisting that science be used only to find "solutions" to "existing problems" is that we rarely know what a solution looks like. Gaston Julia studied fractals in 1918 -- 40 years before Lorenz would find a reason that the related field of chaos theory might be relevant to our lives. Non-Euclidean geometry was an interesting footnote in math textbooks for several hundred years before Einstein showed that our universe is non-Euclidean. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel points out that while the compass was invented a few years after they discovered how to create a vacuum, it was invented several centuries after they discovered magnets. But if the Greeks had declined to study magnetic principles because they weren't useful in solving problems, the Spanish would have had a heck of a time discovering the new world at all.

The US landing on the moon is a superb example of a group of intelligent people banding together to study and solve a specific problem. But the price tag on the moon landing may be why most discoveries go more like:

• Someone finds something interesting, and entertains their friends
• (several years to several centuries later) Someone finds something else interesting, and entertains their friends.
• (repeat as necessary)
• (several years to several decades later) Someone realises that all of those doodads, if combined properly, will solve the greatest problem they've had this week.

Again, you just can't predict the consequences. No one could have guessed, in 16th century Rome, that the same vacuum that allowed the Spanish to get to America and back would someday also (via froglegs and ceramics) lead us into space.

The Dangers of Cloning
I do foresee great danger of having clones relabeled as "experiments" rather than "people." I agree completely that steps need to be taken to prevent this. But banning any technology that might lead to cloning seems like overkill. It probably won't solve the issue; there will always be a Korea or a Adigeon Prime (STDS9) or a Jackson's Whole (Vorkosigan) who will be willing to do it illegally. But it does cut us off from whatever the benefits may be. I'm not saying that my proposed solution (declaring cloned children to be, unequivocally, people, with all inherent citizenship rights thereby) would work, but it does, like yours, ban scientific work that results in killing the fetus -- such experiments would be no more legal than asking a couple to get pregnant, harvesting their fetus, and doing your experiments on that. (I assume we can all agree that that would be highly immoral, not to mention disgusting?)

In Summary
I agree that technology will not solve the fundamental problem with parenting -- people who are unwilling or unable to make the necessary commitment for 18 years and beyond, to make the sacrifices necessary to bring a good person into this world. But neither will the problem be solved by a lack of technology.

[Angela]

Ahimel, I love your posts.

[Matthew Shea]

I'd like to point out a something in response to Ahimel's post: I've never proposed banning anything. I would certainly be in favor of a set of guidelines establishing the conditions under which certain research may or may not be conducted. I like the idea of giving cloned babies the same status as naturally conceived ones. That sounds like an almost-ideal solution.

Also, just because we might not have a good track record at predicting outcomes doesn't mean we shouldn't try. At the very least, we can take the facts as they currently exist, examine them based on our (society in general's) beliefs and establish what is acceptable and what is not. In the business world this would be known as due diligence. When we're talking about human life, we at least owe ourselves that.