Do you think that science will ever be able to perfect an artificial womb.?

Question

I had no idea until 10 minutes ago that there was such a thing. there is research going on now to make one.


Hung-Ching Liu the director of the Reproductive Endocrine Laboratory at Cornell University’s Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility in Manhattan, has become, almost accidentally, the nation’s premier womb-maker. Beginning in 2001, her lab started growing sheets of human tissue composed of cells from the endometrium, the lining of the uterus.“We’d hoped the embryos would implant on this tissue,” Liu says, “so we could learn more about the mechanisms of implantation. But they could not.” The growing embryos would break through the tissue, smack against the petri dish and, like a tree whose roots hit rock, die.

In 2003, in an experiment that hasn’t received as much attention as one might expect—perhaps because Liu hasn’t published her results, due to her qualms about how those results will be received by politicians, activists and desperate would-be parents—a mouse embryo grew almost to full term in one of Liu’s artificial wombs.

Thanks to her research and others’, man-made mouse wombs could be a reality within a decade—and a stepping stone to artificial human wombs. Eventually, these baby incubators could supplant natural ones. Conception could be clinical, and birth bloodless. Gestation could be detached from motherhood, and a fetus could be viable from the instant that sperm and egg fused.

Or not. Days after cheerfully percolating, Liu’s rodent fetus died, deformed and contorted, more seahorse than mouse, a developmental freak. The same thing happened to the next fetus she implanted, and the one after that. “Making babies is more complicated than we imagined,” Liu says. “And we knew going into this that making babies is very, very complicated.”

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurebody/dc8d9371b1d75010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

WOW!!!!!! I am speechless.

Answer 1

If there were artificial wombs my partner and I might actually have a child. We have two perfectly good uteri, but neither of us wants to use ours.

I think artificial wombs would be excellent because they would remove childbearing as a woman-only activity, bringing us closer to a truly equal society.

Answer 2

I think it's a wonderful idea.

But it will never happen. Two reasons: 1) right-wingers want to punish women for having sex by making us have babies.

And, 2) being pregnant sucks, labor hurts, and taking care of babies and little kids is tedious. Men know this. If they really thought it was such a "privilege" like some of them claim, there would have been artificial wombs decades ago. And then men would have prohibited women from doing these things.

Answer 3

Are you saying humans will be having rat baby's? My God what is Christianity coming to? Why don't you people do something don't we have enough rats already with out a super rat womb which could become contagious and be spreading. What if one of those things crawled off into a sewer somewhere and started multiplying and breading little sewer rats. God the city would be overrun in no time. There is no telling how far it wold spread.

Answer 4

Off the top of my head, I think there are some significant ethical questions surrounding the use of such a technology.

Answer 5

I'm sure the artificial womb will be commonplace within our lifetimes.

Answer 6

Sure. Now there may be some "falls" along the way but it can happen eventually.

Answer 7

I believe that anything is possible on a long enough time line.

Answer 8

Lets put it this way it's playing God if they are doing this. They want to conterdict the Lord and his will.