Oct 4, 2017 09:14 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ia/541755/
EXCERPT: [...] The public response among bioethicists and the media, however, was far more elaborate. In the weeks following the paper’s publication, a wide range of speculative narratives painted the development with a dystopian air. In an interview with NPR, Dena Davis, a bioethicist at Lehigh University, invoked Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which human conception and gestation occur entirely outside the body—a concept known as “ectogenesis”—under the control of an autocratic state. In that same NPR segment, Scott Gelfand, a bioethicist at Oklahoma State University, worried that employers could require female employees to use artificial wombs to avoid maternity leave.
The United Kingdom’s New Statesman magazine ran an article with the title “Artificial wombs are only three years away—how scared should women be?” The author provided a feminist perspective on the question of whether an artificial womb will make women obsolete. And an article from Gizmodo declared that the technology could threaten a woman’s right to an abortion. In response, the conservative National Review magazine accused the Gizmodo author of wanting “a constitutional right to a dead baby.”
Discussions about where technology is taking us are surely warranted, though in the case of artificial wombs, the publication of one scientific paper became an occasion for speculation that left the particulars of physiology—and technology—in the dust....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ia/541755/
EXCERPT: [...] The public response among bioethicists and the media, however, was far more elaborate. In the weeks following the paper’s publication, a wide range of speculative narratives painted the development with a dystopian air. In an interview with NPR, Dena Davis, a bioethicist at Lehigh University, invoked Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which human conception and gestation occur entirely outside the body—a concept known as “ectogenesis”—under the control of an autocratic state. In that same NPR segment, Scott Gelfand, a bioethicist at Oklahoma State University, worried that employers could require female employees to use artificial wombs to avoid maternity leave.
The United Kingdom’s New Statesman magazine ran an article with the title “Artificial wombs are only three years away—how scared should women be?” The author provided a feminist perspective on the question of whether an artificial womb will make women obsolete. And an article from Gizmodo declared that the technology could threaten a woman’s right to an abortion. In response, the conservative National Review magazine accused the Gizmodo author of wanting “a constitutional right to a dead baby.”
Discussions about where technology is taking us are surely warranted, though in the case of artificial wombs, the publication of one scientific paper became an occasion for speculation that left the particulars of physiology—and technology—in the dust....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ia/541755/