“Here’s what you need to know”
Shit, you make it sound like it’s compulsory or something. Are they gonna go around just shoving wombs into people?
I say we force them to be put into conservative men to see how they like it.
Hey, if people want to outlaw abortion, here we go. They can surrender their fetus to the state. Win-win. Except for all the extra financial burden the state will incur and will need to increase taxes to cover. Instead of, you know, a one time payment that could be covered by the state, insurance, out of pocket, or a charitable organization.
I don’t even need to know this is a thing. Fucking clickbait bullshit.
We got like 8 billion people on the planet already. This is a solution to a problem that simply doesn’t exist.
Also, image what little Jimmy is gonna think when he finds out he was grown in a laboratory. Little Jimmy is gonna go fucking insane…
Also, image what little Jimmy is gonna think when he finds out he was grown in a laboratory
That’s not what artificial wombs will do. Currently we have incubators, that’s pretty successful for births between 32 and 37 weeks gestation and sort of successful for 28 to 32 weeks gestation. Artificial wombs will allow hospitals to have better rates of success for the 28 to 32 weeks gestation and allow for a new group of 22 to 28 weeks gestation.
In a round about way the artificial wombs are much more sophisticated incubators. Instead of well controlled rooms and layers of barrier to prevent pathogens, the preterm child is placed in a sack filled with fluids. And rather than concentrated oxygen delivered via a nasal cannula (which requires some pretty advanced development of the lungs), it’s delivered via the umbilical cord. Delivering nutrition to a preterm is a complex determination but in some cases it may require delivery via IV, in the artificial womb it is also delivered via the umbilical cord.
For the most part the artificial womb will allow higher success rates for preterm birth. The artificial womb will not be useful for births < 22 weeks and will not be something that preterm babies would spend months at a time in. It’s not that sophisticated a device nor attempts to be that. At most a preterm child would spend a few weeks within the bag and then be transferred to an incubator when chances of success are much higher there.
No one is popping embryos inside a bag and then opening it up nine months later to pull their kid out. We’re still really, really, really far from that point. Likely we’re not going to have that technology for some time from now, but who knows? That said, it ain’t this technology.
I wouldn’t care. Lots of people carry on knowing that they’re the product of an accident, incest, rape, or were given up by their biological parents. Oh, then there’s IVF.
Someone learning that they were grown in an artificial womb may conclude that their parents couldn’t conceive them the natural way but regardless, they really, really wanted them. That’s pure love, man.
Little Jimmy won’t give a fuck how he was born unless we give him shit about it. And believe it or not, people who have enough money to afford artificial wombs do not contribute to overpopulation.
And believe it or not, people who have enough money to afford artificial wombs do not contribute to overpopulation.
Elon Musk has 11 children, but aside from that, that’s an ominous thing to read. What are the downsides of overpopulation? Overconsumption of resources/overburdening the environment, both of which people who are rich enough to afford artificial wombs do more than the rest of us. Even more unfortunate, wealth is a largely heritable trait
Elon Musk would be able to pay as many women as he’d like to have his spawn, so artificial wombs to people at his level are irrelevant.
Either way, whether you birth or grow a child, you are contributing to the population.
Your money doesn’t matter, +1 human is +1 human. As if we don’t have enough already…
At the end of the day there still needs to be a population, and a sudden demographic collapse is much more devastating than overpopulation. We have a lot of systems that are dependent on being manned by a lot of people, and putting the kibosh on all births would leave a lot of vacant spots we can’t fill right now.
Pump the brakes on Malthusian scaremongering just a little bit, okay?
Around 100 years ago there was only somewhere in the ballpark of 2 billion people on the planet. Today at roughly 8 billion, half the people could disappear and we’d still be overpopulated.
And people wonder why the climate is changing so rapidly. It’s not only the fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses, it’s also overpopulation.
The planet ain’t getting any bigger just because people wanna make a surplus of babies. We already have enough, how about let’s allow birth rates to slide a bit for a while?
I think this is worth pursuing not because of population concerns but for the simple fact that child birth is still a fairly dangerous thing to go through for both the mother and child. If we had a viable option for reproduction that didn’t require women to go through child birth that could have a profound impact on both women’s mortality as well as infant mortality. It also as pointed out in the article could help preterm survival rates.
Okay, and who’s going to raise those test tube children if people aren’t deciding to have children?
