An artificial uterus
In the next 50 years or so, women may be able to have children without being pregnant.
After in vitro fertilization, the embryos will be immersed in artificial uteri filled with synthetic amniotic fluid, connected to placental machines that will provide them for nine months the hormones and nutrients essential for their development.
It is to this mind-blowing prospect that the biologist and philosopher Henri Atlan has just devote a book that inspires the hope - or the dread - of seeing the day when women will be freed from the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth .
Research is progressing
While working on his book, Henri Atlan discovered that research on the artificial uterus already existed. For example, at Cornell University in the United States, researcher Hung-Ching Liu successfully implanted a human embryo in a receptacle lined with cells taken from a woman's uterine wall. The embryo developed quite normally for six days, and the researcher is currently pursuing her experiments with the agreement of the ethics committee of her laboratory.
In Japan, Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara transferred to an artificial uterus, and kept alive for eighteen days, a goat fetus, extracted from her mother's womb after seventeen weeks of gestation.
Towards a liberation of the woman's body?
All these works are officially dictated by medical reasons: to allow sterile women to procreate without passing by surrogate mothers and to save very very premature babies. But, according to Henri Atlan, if the artificial uterus exists one day, it will no longer be perceived as a cure for infertility or prematurity, but as a tool for the liberation of the woman's body, just like contraception or abortion. "To the extent that a significant portion of women will see there a source of freedom from the constraints of pregnancy, it will be difficult to resist their claim to freely dispose of their bodies.
For or against the artificial uterus?
What about the consequences of the artificial uterus on humanity, the relationship between the sexes, the relationship and the well-being of children?
We asked these questions of the impertinent jurist Marcela Iacub and the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski.
FOR
The first sees only advantages to this invention. "Already, it seems to me a good thing for the health of the child. We can monitor its development without imposing aggressive examinations on its mother. But above all, this will finally bring about equality between men and women, to eliminate the fundamental dissymmetry between the sexes, between sterile women and fertile women. Kinship will be more balanced. The father and the mother will have the same distance with respect to the child, who will surely have more facility to become autonomous. There is currently a sacralisation of the belly and childbirth, in my opinion very detrimental to women. It is feared that if they were no longer in charge of procreation, everything is on the cards. The artificial uterus makes it possible to think of a different destiny for humanity and for sexual identity. Just for that, I'm for. "
AGAINST
Chancellor of equal rights in difference, Sylviane Agacinski defends a radically different position. "What bothers me in the project of artificial uterus is that freedom is associated with disembodiment and, ultimately, the disappearance of the difference between the sexes. Rather than spending money on research that does not seem to me to be a priority, we should put these resources in place to fight against discrimination. We confuse similarity and equality. Behind all this lies the idea that the carnal, always associated with the feminine, is inferior, and that progress consists in eliminating this dimension of the body. Finally, under a very avant-garde exterior, this idea joins the old Christian dream of the disembodiment and masculinization of humanity. "
MAIS
For Henri Atlan, on the contrary, assuming that humanity does not pay into totalitarianism, "the artificial uterus would put an end to the war of the sexes. Anthropologists agree that since the dawn of time, men have been fed to the procreative power of women an obscure and deadly jealousy, have begun to dominate them to control their belly and appropriate the fruit of their bowels. If this asymmetry disappears, only fraternity ... and desire will remain. "
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http://www.marieclaire.fr/,cheri-mon-bocal-a-accouche,20161,323.asp
Note that the article is from
Marie Claire...
women's magazine, even if the end of the text is intended to be a conclusion by balancing the pros and cons of this type of measure, the damage is done, it is a question of "freeing the body of the woman" (who would have been imprisoned by who?) of gestation!
Here we are entering the worst techno-scientist delusion, in the same way that some necromancers had accustomed us by saying that the digestive system of cows was more adapted to animal meal than grass!
"Engineering is sometimes about knowing when to stop" Charles De Gaulle.