- Joined
- Jul 23, 2009
- Messages
- 3,357
- Reaction score
- 986
- Location
- Alabama
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Libertarian
In a different thread, I had brought up a point about the possibility of bringing a child to term using an artificial womb. As it is the technology is still not there, but I just watched an episode of "Through the Wormhole" where a man had designed an artificial uterus to save an endangered species of shark.
An Artificial Uterus Gives an Endangered Species a Shot at Survival | Popular Science
Now granted, this is a shark, not a person, but it is a step in the direction.
Through the Wormhole s04e06 Episode Script | SS
I just thought I'd reintroduce the question and idea. If we could birth infants through an artificial womb, how would that change abortion?
An Artificial Uterus Gives an Endangered Species a Shot at Survival | Popular Science
Now granted, this is a shark, not a person, but it is a step in the direction.
Freeman: Let's say a female sperm and a male egg could be created in a lab.
Couples in any combination of genders could conceive a child.
But the fetus would still need to spend nine months inside a woman -- unless we could grow our young in an artificial womb.
We all began our lives in the same place -- a woman's womb.
It was nine months of blissful ignorance for most of us but not for our mothers.
What if women didn't have to carry the burden of pregnancy? A radical shift in reproduction is already happening.
Marine biologist Nick Otway has just brought living creatures into the world in an completely new way.
Otway: We've done something that was rather strange, rather abnormal, and challenging, too, to think about what are the implications in the future.
Freeman: Nick has built a machine that gives birth to living sharks.
Otway: We're looking at a gray box, which is actually an artificial uterus.
We shorten it to an a.
U.
, and we developed this -- designed it -- to actually take embryos out of a particular species of shark and see if we can continue their development in an artificial environment.
Freeman: Nick built his a.
U.
-- His mechanical womb -- to restore the population of the critically endangered grey nurse shark.
It was a mission that came straight from the top levels of the Australian government.
Otway: One minister actually challenged me to come up with a breeding program.
He said, "Okay, come back in six weeks, and don't tell me you can't do it.
" Freeman: Human beings have just about mastered keeping adult fish alive outside of their natural habitat by engineering aquariums.
Chemicals are balanced, ph levels kept in check, waste products cleaned out, and nutrients delivered on schedule.
But keeping fish alive that haven't been born yet is a whole new challenge.
Otway: The a.
U.
Is a small aquarium, and so you got to create the environment for the embryos.
They're delicate.
They have specific requirements, and the mother is not providing that -- you are.
Freeman: Unlike an adult fish, the needs of delicate shark embryos drastically change as they grow.
Otway: Sharks use a complex uterine fluid early on in development and subsequent -- three months into development, they switch to a seawater environment, which mum pumps in the seawater.
So we really do need to understand that complex fluid -- the composition and how we need to maintain it in an artificial environment, and that's something that's not been done before.
Freeman: Nick programmed his artificial uterus to change its chemistry from bodily fluid to seawater in line with a mother shark's natural rhythm.
Experimenting with the severely endangered grey nurse shark was too risky, so Nick calibrated the first run of his artificial womb for a more common species -- the wobbegong shark.
Otway: Wobbegong sharks are easily handled in captivity and easily maintained in captivity.
We already knew that they had actually bred in captivity.
All those things meant that we could actually have a smaller animal that we could use as a model species, and, of course, it wasn't critically endangered.
Freeman: To grow baby wobbegongs, Nick harvested the growing embryos from a pregnant female and transferred them to his artificial womb.
He kept constant watch over the tiny unborn pups, precisely managing the conditions to keep them alive.
Otway: I think you become attached to these guys.
They're sort of animals that you've taken away from mum, and you hope that nothing detrimental occurs.
Freeman: The procedure was a resounding success.
After 9 weeks, Nick's lab gave birth to Nick believes that what is possible for sharks today is possible for humans tomorrow.
It's all a matter of knowing how and when a mother's womb changes its chemical composition.
[ Crying ] Otway: I think technology has come leaps and bounds in just a few years, and around the corner, we could be looking at some major changes.
I could potentially see preterm infants possibly going back further in the preterm, but even then, I think there's still ethical questions one has to ask about it.
Freeman: Would a baby grown in a laboratory be the same as an infant nurtured inside a woman? Would society accept these children as equals to those born from a natural womb? Only time will answer the many questions of growing our young outside a woman's uterus.
We may choose to face these questions sooner than you think.
Through the Wormhole s04e06 Episode Script | SS
I just thought I'd reintroduce the question and idea. If we could birth infants through an artificial womb, how would that change abortion?