The Advent of the Artificial Womb

Suddenly, it's a braver, newer world.

(photo: Source: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, via YouTube)

Quietly, without much fanfare, a nuclear bomb was dropped upon the world a month ago.

Not an actual mechanical explosive, device but rather an invention with by far more destructive power than a mere nuclear weapon.

Apparently, researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have created the first functioning artificial womb.

I've worried about this day for many years. It seemed almost inevitable considering the dual race to demean human beings and to worship technology.

There have been many attempts at creating such a device over the years. They've all met with varying degrees of failure ever since the 1950s in Japan, Europe and the States. In fact, a 1996 New York Times Magazine story declared “the artificial womb exists” describing a Japanese lab experiment with baby goats. However, the praises were premature, as the fetuses died of circulatory failure.

The “Philadelphia Model” has been the first to actually function in the way its manufacturers have claimed.

A premature fetal lamb was successfully gestated in April. Are humans next?

The artificial womb was intended, originally, to preserve the lives of premature babies. According to the World Health Organization, 15 million babies―approximately 1 in 10―around the world are born too early every year. Almost 1 million children die each year due to complications of preterm birth. Many survivors face a lifetime of disability, including learning disabilities and/or mobility problems, visual and hearing problems.

Lambs were used in this experiment because practically everything modern medical science knows about fetal development of humans comes from the intense study of lambs as an analogue. Here's a video of this travesty:


The study was published in the journal Nature Communications. According to the article, Partridge and his fellow researchers suspended Eight lamb fetuses that were between 105 to 115 days old—roughly the same level of development as a 23-week-old human fetus―in a liquid-filled, artificial womb, allowing them to further develop for four weeks. This is significantly longer than all previous attempts.

As they floated, the lambs' brains and organs developed normally. The fetuses blinked their eyes, fattened up, grew wooly coats and, otherwise, seemingly, gestated normally.

If approved, the wombs can be tested on human preemies within three to five years.


Radical individualism and gender theory

With this invention and possible future “improvements,” feminists should take care since, less we forget, with the advancement of artificial uteri, women would become superfluous to society and, indeed, to the species.

In fact, Frank Herbert explored the concept of Tleilaxu, a planet in his brilliant Dune series, made up entirely of men who have otherwise enslaved and turned their women into “axlotl tanks” ―semi-artificial uteri/biological factories used to create clones and the time/space-altering spice “melange.”

One can easily see the consequences of an artificial womb would have on those singles, couples or even so-called “trouples” who can't otherwise produce children. But by allowing those who can't otherwise have children, gestation of a zygote will become a paid-for commodity.

The Scholastic notion of humanity was that of a unity of mind, body and soul was set upon by René Descartes (1596-1650) who conceived of man as a ghost in a machine―a Manichean dualism of a mind imprisoned inside a fleshy body.

This rejection of the classic definition of humanity degenerated in modern times to an extreme “gender ideology” which has been simmering for centuries.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), the French feminist philosopher, who wrote The Second Sex, argued that women have always been defined by their relations to men and will therefore always have subordinate roles. Therefore, gender, for her, is a ”social construct” which finds its origins in a severe malaise about the female body, specifically. Thus, it's the woman's body that opposes her existence as a person. (i.e., according to de Beauvoir, there's no such a thing as womanhood, only personhood.) Thus, she must resist her own body which, generally means preventing pregnancy from occurring altogether or aborting one's child as quickly as possible.

However, to the reasonably minded person, a woman's body, and a man's body for that matter, is clearly made in terms of relationship. And healthy relationships only make sense when one is dependent and interactive. For example… mother-father-child and man-woman. There has never been a human being ever born without a mother and father. We are all dependent upon two entities―two beings―to bring our own self into being. Our very body speak the language of dependency and community.

This intentional self-destructive idea that women need to separate themselves from their femininity and the very biology that make them women in the first place, let alone allows for the survival of the human race, is catastrophic at best. And it's been a long time a'birthin. (Please excuse the pun.)

Feminist Judith Butler popularized the ridiculous notion that gender is not something essential to human beings but rather “performative.” Oddly, she claims it is an illusion created by constant repetition of stylized actions. For Butler, the human body, particularly women's bodies, is a sign of bondage to nature which must be overcome. In fact, she would argue that we need not even bother concocting a conception of the body at all. For her, the ineluctable fixity and indisputability physicality of the body are “phantom illusions.”

Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012), a Canadian-American Marxist feminist, unthinkingly argued that the basic cause of women's inequality (i.e., male oppression) was due to the fact of having bodies which God/Nature required of them the sacrifice of child-bearing and rearing. In her The Dialectic of Sex, she wrote:

The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally ... The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it ... The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.

For the sake of full disclosure, Firestone also imagined a future where children were collectively raised by an omnibenevolent and omnipotent Big Brother-style government. Aldous Huxley warned us about imagining such a world.

It also should be pointed out that when Firestone died in New York City in 2012, she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, starving, and alone. In fact, she had been dead for a week before her body was discovered in her apartment. Her mental illness made her already hate and feel disconnected to her own body.

One's argument isn't bolstered by the fact that one's savior suffers from schizophrenia and can't distinguish between reality and her own delusions. I had volunteered with the homeless for many years and though many are good-hearted people who have found themselves in financial situations out of their control, many also suffer from mental delusions and thus, I wouldn't trust them if they told me the sun was out at noon. Putting one's trust in a mental patient's uncontrollable “inner demons” makes for a poor life philosophy and an even worse science. One can't expect rational thinking from someone who, by definition, can't think rationally.

Please also keep in mind, de Beauvoir, Firestone and Butler and those who agree with their radical narcissistic solipsism also dispute the existence of the soul and free will. Thus, they insist that humans don't have a spiritual dimension and their physical side is completely dependent upon the feelings they're celebrating that particular day which are merely an illusion created by the body which they also don't believe objectively exists.

So, for those keeping score, according to these people, genes, hormones, obvious sexual dimorphism and the requisite body parts mean nothing at all. Apparently, science and common sense have had it all wrong all of these countless eons since we descended from the trees. The truth is that our sexual differences extend down to the cellular level. We are male and female because of our genes and the resultant hormones generated by those genes and not by our “feelings” that we are one gender or another.


On the Other Hand…

We all laud medical advancements that protect premature babies but this is a step too far which can easily be abused. And defense of this technology and all of its accompanying abuses will be couched in the language of “civil rights.” (i.e., “I have the right to produce a child born not only out of wedlock but as far removed from a loving, creative and unitive aspect as possible!”)

Children are not a fashion accessory. Nor are they commodities for which one can comparative shop. If one has a right to purchase a human being, that human being will be born and live and die a slave to those who arraigned for his birth.

On the other hand, the often-ignored definition used by pro-death atheists of the fetus' viability outside of the womb has now been turned on its ear. Theoretically, a fertilized zygote can be gestated for a full nine-months in one of these disposable Ziploc bags. Complainers start your engines!

Life for a tiny, frail preemie in an incubator, which is essentially also an artificial womb, is difficult enough. The babies are fed via a tube which may include sedatives to help them remain unstressed because of the ventilators mask strapped to their faces. (Interestingly, I've never heard of anyone in the pro-death camp ever call a preemie a “blob of flesh.”)

Each year, about 30,000 American babies are born too early and are considered “critically preterm,” that is, born prior to 26 weeks. Before 24 weeks, only about half will survive, and those who do are likely to endure long-term medical complications such as disabilities that effect walking, talking, seeing and hearing according to Dr. Kevin Dysart, a neonatologist at Philadelphia's Children's Hospital.

Current estimates as to the development of this new technology suggests that within ten-years, human babies born between 23 and 25 weeks will be able to be raised in such artificial uteri.

The advantage to an artificial uterus over a ventilator is that, depending upon the fetus' age, the first few breaths of air stop the development of the lungs causing them even more stress that could lead to death for these tiny people.

The artificial womb would allow the infant to continue “breathing” through its umbilical cord as its floats in the lab-made amniotic fluid. And, instead of an air pump, the fetus would rely upon its own heart to regulate oxygen-carrying blood, or its chemical equivalent, drawn through its still intact umbilical cord and into an oxygenator simulating the mother's placenta.

In addition to assisting in the child's lung development, the amniotic fluid would protect the baby from infections and support the development of the intestines. Frankly, if we adults still enjoyed the immune system of a fetus, we'd all lived to be 600-years-old. The artificial womb can theoretically save countless lives. Premature births cost American $43 billion every year. The artificial uteri could theoretically save us a great deal of resources along with a large number of human lives.


The choice before us

Though “scientismists” claim science and technology are amoral and value-free, so is the loaded rifle that is being brought to bear upon us. The artificial uterus is fraught with danger to the point of moral disaster on the par with abortion.

Perhaps this technology can help premature babies in their struggle for life. Perhaps incalculably evil people will use artificial uteri to create something other than a loving child — lest anyone forget the horror perpetrated upon a 6-year-old Russian boy by American homosexual activist Mark J. Newton and his Australian partner Peter Truong. Having paid US$8,000 for the infant, the couple immediately began sexually abusing the infant within 24 hours of adopting him. In fact, they sold his tiny fragile body to the highest bidder on three continents while filming the abuse. They trained the child into thinking such sexual abuse was “normal” and that, if pressed by “outsiders,” the boy was to deny any wrongdoing on the part of his abusers.

Had it not been for a chance coming upon this horrific proof of their abuse, their crimes would have remained secret. Recall that Newton and Truong insisted that they were merely two people who had the “right” to adopt just like a heterosexual couple in a “loving home.” Instead, the child suffered in a “house of horrors."

Interestingly, Moira Greyland, a Celtic music harpist, is the daughter of two American writers. Her mother – notorious bisexual, pedophile rapist and pagan polemicist Marion Zimmer Bradley (d. 1999) — was a science fiction and fantasy novelist. Her best-known book is the Mists of Avalon, an anti-Christian feminist rewriting of the Arthurian legend. Her second husband, and Moira's father, Walter Breen, wrote books on numismatics. Breen was a misogynistic, bisexual, incestuous pedophile. Greyland reported that her parents abused her in the hope that she would grow up to be “sexually liberated” sans the “moral hang-ups.”

What happens when someone chooses not to bring the “viable” baby to full term and to essentially abort it? Whatever the “right” they claim to do so will obviously have nothing to do with a woman's control over her body as there will be no woman's body to be had. Instead, they might claim caveat emptor and “buyer's remorse” instead. And this frightens me.

And what of a child who is birthed independent of a mother. Will biological, genetic relationships and social relationships have to be redefined by the courts.

And once this technology becomes available, will natural childbirth with all of its inherent dangers and “inconveniences” be deemed “cruel and inhumane” thusly forcing all women to alienate themselves from their biological natures and “give birth” in plastic bags hung upon walls? One could hardly call this “giving birth.” Perhaps instead, we would forced by political correction to call it “reproducing.”

Will those raised in these real life “axlotl tanks” be considered humans or merely owned property? And, if the latter, what's stopping an individual or, indeed, a company or even a nation, from developing its own “line” of designer babies to fulfill some ghastly function such a secret army who have no loyalty to anyone other than to those who have paid for their births. Perhaps an infinite number of slaves whipped up in a plastic baggie nailed to a wall and raised with neither mother nor father. No guardians to watch out for their better interest. But rather the interests of those who have paid for their creation in artificial uteri. After all, without the guarantee of a family's protection and the innate, divinely-guaranteed human dignity, what is stopping anyone from claiming any human being as property. In fact, the laws that protected slave owners used similar language to bolster their claims.



It's a braver, newer world suddenly.

It's moments like this that make me long for simpler days.

There is an important spiritual, psychological and biological aspect to having two parents which naturally conceive of a child and raise it in a loving home. Some adults are incapable of a loving relationship due to temperament, values, mental illness or simply being socially maladroit. Nature has given them a natural contraceptive that we should rescind. If these people can truly not find someone to “love them as they are,” perhaps they are unlovable and must be pressured to accommodate others. 

How many times have we encountered selfish people who insist on being loved as they are but who otherwise, patently refuse to love others as they are? An artificial womb-for-hire will circumvent this just as sperm donor banks and surrogate mothers have already done to the socially and psychologically undesirable such as the insanely, selfish and unrealistic, excessive spectacle of Nadya Douda, the so-called OctoMom, and her unscrupulous obstetrician who turned herself into a freak show. Had she had access to this technology, perhaps she would have cut a check for a dozen more babies.

As it is, secularists can't keep their hands off Christian children as in the case of the Wunderlich family from Germany who had their four children taken from them simply because they wanted to homeschool them. Or the case of Norway's Bodnariu family who lost their children, supposedly, because of their use of spanking as a form of discipline.

Suddenly we want to give secularists to right to produce children sans the commitment and self-sacrifice? That sounds foolhardy on the face of it.

By separating childbirth from pregnancy and, indeed, from God/Nature-given differences in gender, these people neither celebrate nor worship God nor His Creation which these people and for which they give thanks but rather an “anti-Creation.” They reject God and all His works.

Sound familiar?