ShareThis
“I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life.”
-Deuteronomy 30:19-
An estimated 900,000 abortions was performed in the Philippines in 2011 according to the World Health Organization; that number is rising! Seventy percent of unwanted pregnancies back home end in abortion according to WHO. The wide majority of these are due to harsh economic factors. Impoverished and over burdened with more children than they can adequately care for, poor families often seek the quick fix. Many if not most women back home can’t afford the 2,000-5,000 Pesos or $23-$93 USD to terminate problem pregnancies. Desperate women rely on home remedies, abortion pills, and black magic to end unwanted pregnancies also according to WHO. Many women are severely injured, rendered sterile, and killed from do-it-yourself abortions. Some hospitals have been accused of punishing them by refusing treatment to injured women or hold back anesthesia when they do. Subjecting these poor souls to additional agonies is criminal! Reader have you ever witnessed a home abortion? When I was a kid a young woman living in our building used some instrument to induce an abortion; it backfired; she almost died from hemorrhaging and other messy complications. My Mom helped save this poor lady’s life. Mom heard the woman’s piercing screams and knew something was wrong. Entering the basement apartment seeing the place splattered with blood, she called for an ambulance. Most people realize that abortion is immoral in a vast majority of cases but no law religious/civil can stop it. What do we do to trim its’ deadly effects?
The development of an apparatus that function like a human womb could possibly quell the abortion debate. Girls/women with unwanted pregnancies would have the option of ‘aborting’ their preborn children live and intact then place them in humane artificial environments for further development. These birthing centers will enable underdeveloped human beings to reach full gestation. Once they are birthed the children could be returned to their mothers or put up for adoption. Pregnant women who would normally terminate their pregnancies with lethal effect could walk away knowing their children would be placed in safe home environments once fully formed and removed from AW or artificial womb machines sans guilty consciences. There will always be women who would insist on their ‘right’ to destroy their unborn babies via traditional termination methods.
Women with histories of difficult pregnancies could have the option of having their fetuses removed during safe stages, developed in vitro, returned to them safe, sound and healthier than in natural wombs upon delivery. A ready supply of ‘surplus’ human beings could be used to populate terraformed planets once space technology is developed at levels to permit inter-planetary/inter-stellar travel/colonization. In the long run these children could save future humanity from possible extinction if conditions on Earth become unlivable. AWT or artificial womb technology will enable childless couples/individuals to experience the joys/challenges of parenthood, help career women continue working without the inconvenience of taking off valuable time for maternity leaves. Depending upon your religious/ethical points of view same sex couples would have the option to have and raise children without heterosexual ‘interference.’
Worse case scenario AWT babies could be ‘doctored’ in vitro by unscrupulous governments/businesses/individuals and used for questionable purposes upon delivery. Case in point: the development and sale of human infants could supply the multi-billion dollar international sex trade ‘industry’ and enable radical feminists to eliminate the need for male contributions to the human reproductive process. Nefarious social institutions/individuals could destroy defective fetuses; eliminate racial groups and genders they view unfit for full development via AW devices. The latter case is a page out of the pseudo-science of eugenics ala 1930’s rural America, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the culling of ‘surplus’ females in India and China via sex selection abortions and gradual elimination of Black males in the United States. Other problems resulting from AWT is insurance companies, employers, and governments may coerce women to deliver their babies for an assortment of reprehensible reasons. Owing to their snails eye view of life, governments will use AWT in an assortment of fiendish fetal experiments. AWT babies could be subject to brain implantation experiments that would convert them into zombies slavishly catering to the will of tyrants, corrupt corporate power brokers, and other morally challenged entities. Creating beings part human part lower animal (a Cerberus) has long been on the AW weird science agenda. Artificial womb technology could make what was once the stuff of sordid day dreams into nightmarish reality.
Arguments pro and con regarding AWT were mentioned by Aldous Huxley in his science fiction classic ‘Brave New World.’ In the novel there’s a chapter that mention artificially assisting embryonic life outside the womb. All that’s needed to ‘grow’ human beings is a female egg and a drop of sperm. AWT will permit laboratories to grow babies of the desired sex for a host of reasons. Case in point: in the Roman Empire it was common practice for whoremongers to scrounge through city dumps in search of unwanted girl/boy babies to be raised as sexual playthings. Human sexuality could be used exclusively for recreation, cementing relationships but not reproduction. If sexual pleasure is a primary inducement for all species to replicate themselves, will the human libido drive become extinct once AWT become commonplace?
Would AWT remove the ‘joys of pregnancy’ from parents? Not having to carry a child in one’s tummy for nine months, no smoking, no boozing, saying no to certain foods, saying yes to others, limited sex culminating in delivery room hell would be a welcomed release for a lot of women. When I was a teacher I jokingly asked a female staff member “What’s it like having a baby?” Her response was “ever try to s*** a watermelon?” She later informed me that she had her fallopian tubes tied after her second child.
After the success of the controversial in vitro fertilization (IVF) method, surrogate motherhood and artificial insemination led to serious talk of manufacturing a machine to act as a human womb substitute. In theory such artificial birth devises must be self-contained synthetic systems designed to replicate conditions in the human female’s uterus. Inside this devise will be food, oxygen, a waste disposal unit, and fetal umbilical cord to maintain blood flow between mother and preborn. The faux placenta will be engineered from endometrial cells removed from the mother of a healthy human donor then grown artificially. During an early trimester the living fetus will be removed from the host mother and implanted in this artificial growth environment for 9 months. Throughout gestational development the AW is attached to an incubator filled with artificial amniotic fluid called LRS or Lactated Ringer’s Solution. Throughout fetal development the baby will be permitted to move around freely and at optimum temperature. Part two ‘Building Better Babies’ will be solely devoted to the technical aspects of AWT with model construction methods and fully illustrated pictures of this questionable technology; nuff’ said. Reader I wish you and your loved ones a very Happy New Year; don’t drink and drive.