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Is artificial-womb technology a tool for women's liberation?
While some women experience pregnancy and childbirth as joyful, natural, and
fulfilling, others find themselves recoiling in horror at the physical demands
of carrying and sustaining a child in their womb, and even more so at the
potential brutality of giving birth. Some might view the blood, sweat, and tears
as a necessary and unavoidable part of life. Others, such as the radical
feminist Shulamith Firestone, writing in her book The Dialectic of Sex (1970),
assume a less forgiving view of the process as "barbaric" or akin to "sh*tting a
pumpkin." Most, like myself, oscillate between the two positions, or else sit
somewhere in between.
Whatever one's position on the matter of the "naturalness" of pregnancy, it
can't be denied that the development of artificial-womb technology (known as
ectogenesis) would radically change the debate. First, there are the therapeutic
benefits it promises: women prone to risky pregnancies could transfer the fetus
to an artificial womb, thereby allowing fetal development to continue at little
cost to their own physical health; likewise, fetuses at risk of premature birth
could be transferred to artificial wombs to complete their development as
required. The blood, sweat, and tears, it seems, might not be so intrinsic to
the process after all.
Second, the technology could have important social benefits for women. For
Firestone, artificial wombs would eliminate a crucial condition that currently
ensures women's oppression by neutralizing the heavily gendered process of
reproduction. Though there exist indisputable biological differences between the
sexes, she argued that this difference becomes oppressive in the unfair division
of reproductive labor and its naturalization through the ideal of the nuclear
family. But if fetuses were to develop in artificial wombs, women would finally
be free to pursue their interests and desires outside of their reproductive
duties.
Even this cursory overview of the therapeutic and nontherapeutic potential of
artificial wombs seems to present a compelling case in the technology's favor.
Add to this list the many more people for whom it would make reproduction
possible, and this case becomes near airtight. So, in 2017, when researchers
successfully developed eight lamb fetuses in bags mimicking the conditions of a
sheep's uterus, the mainstream media attention was hardly surprising. Despite
the researchers' best efforts, their findings were recast as advancing the
development of artificial wombs and, through this process, decades-old arguments
such as Firestone's were thrust back into the spotlight.
It's true that Firestone's claims are still well-supported among contemporary
feminists — for example, the philosopher Anna Smajdor in her paper "The Moral
Imperative for Ectogenesis" (2007) — but the renewed excitement surrounding
artificial wombs obscures the fact that the technology's emancipatory potential
is in reality quite limited. For one, artificial wombs could ensure the fair
redistribution of reproductive labor only if this labor was limited to the
process of pregnancy itself. But, post-birth, it remains true that it's
(largely) women who are expected to breastfeed, pump milk, and raise and nurture
the child. This doesn't preclude those others who can and do partake in what is
traditionally regarded as maternal work from the conversation, but it does
remind us of the stigma and censure directed at those women who do not — whether
by choice or otherwise. In this context, it's unclear what artificial wombs
would do to address the social conditions that can make reproduction so
oppressive in the first place.
This hints at a much bigger problem in assuming unequivocal support for the
feminist cause. Artificial wombs promise to relieve women of the physical
oppression that feminists have associated with the reproductive process, but it
doesn't necessarily address the problem on the conceptual level — that is, it
doesn't challenge the particular patriarchal values and thinking that render the
process oppressive in the eyes of those feminists. In fact, a closer inspection
of the metaphysical entanglements of artificial-womb technology indicates the
potential to harm the liberation effort instead.
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https://theweek.com/articles/887096/artificialwomb-technology-tool-womens-liberation