George S. Takach, an expert on technology and the law, is an author of non-fiction books, including his latest, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle Between China, Russia, and America.
Ectogenesis sounds like something from the realm of science fiction. But the concept, which refers to a cluster of biotechnologies that aim to allow human embryos to be gestated and brought to term outside of a uterus – an ectogenesis device (EGD) is effectively an artificial womb – is closer to reality than you think.
In 1996, researchers in Japan were able to put goat fetuses in artificial amniotic fluid; five years later, a Cornell University professor grew a human embryo in an artificial womb for 10 days, and in 2003, she grew a mouse embryo in a bioengineered uterus, though the mouse was born deformed. While no fully functional EGD yet exists, lamb embryos have been kept alive for 28 days in a research EGD, and millions of dollars in venture capital have poured into tech companies trying to bring one to market.
These are all part of the enormous strides that have taken place in assisted human (and animal) reproductive technologies ever since the world’s first “test-tube baby” was born in 1978. About 2 per cent of births every year in the United States are the result of some form of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and for births by women nearing the end of their natural child-bearing years, the number rises to 9 per cent. At the other end of the gestation process, leading medical centres around the world have become experts at keeping alive preterm babies who are born after only 22 weeks of gestation, instead of the normal 40 weeks. Set in this context, ectogenesis is not such a stretch.
That’s particularly interesting if ectogenesis can help countries reverse precipitous population declines. And even more so if you’re Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, and your respective country’s population is expected to fall by 50 per cent or more over the balance of this century because of plunging birth rates, while also being averse to immigration by foreigners leading to naturalized citizenship. It would be naive to think that research into ectogenesis technologies for humans will not be accelerated in China and Russia, among others – and we need to consider the implications, amid a global contest between the leading autocracies and democracies playing out in Ukraine, the South China Sea and other fronts.
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Ectogenesis raises a slew of scientific, medical and technical questions, but frankly these pale in comparison with the social, moral, ethical and political challenges the process poses, particularly if it is used by the state to raise population levels without the participation of mothers in baby birthing or parents in child rearing. For example: What is the social model for bringing into the world large numbers of babies through EGD technology, and then raising them outside of the family model? What effects will it have on the social, psychological, emotional and legal development of the resulting people, the governments that midwife them, and the society in which all this is happening?
If ectogenesis is undertaken at scale by autocratic states, large numbers of children could be raised without a parent. This would be unprecedented in recent times. The few historical examples of raising large numbers of children “for the benefit of the state” offer some very sobering lessons. According to the philosopher Plutarch, the ancient militaristic Greek city-state of Sparta (in the form of a council of elders) decided whether newborns were strong enough to live or die, “on the grounds that it is neither better for themselves nor for the city to live [their] natural life poorly equipped.” At around the age of 7, most Spartan boys would leave home for the agoge, the state-sponsored education program that would train them for battle in the name of Sparta.
Orphanages aren’t a useful precedent either, because for the most part, their goal is to place their children with families, or at least with parents. The driver behind state-driven ectogenesis would be a lack of adults wanting to raise children. In these countries, raising children without parents would become a feature of the system, not a bug.
Democratic governments will also need to plan for a world where ectogenesis goes forward in the autocracies, but is banned in the democracies. What effect will that have on geopolitics? Will this asymmetry eventually play a major role in determining the outcome of the Cold War 2.0?
If ectogenesis is developed and perfected in the autocracies, women in many democracies will also find themselves wondering whether using an EGD makes sense for them, given the risks of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, and other factors. In such a mode, though, the EGD wouldn’t prevent the child-rearing issues – just the pregnancy and child-birthing ones.
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The question of whether ectogenesis should even be allowed will be a fraught one to answer, if the history of the debates around IVF is any indication. Pope Francis recently called for a ban on “despicable” surrogacy, where a woman not married to the father agrees to carry the parents’ embryo to term, in some cases for a financial payment. Russia, for instance, has fairly deep experience with surrogacy, typically tied to IVF clinics; the U.S. is also one of the leading countries for surrogacy, though a recent court ruling in Alabama that equated frozen embryos to children showed how controversial IVF services remain. If the Pope detests surrogacy, his head will positively explode when he learns of the first ectogenesis clinic.
So it behooves us to start having probing conversations about ectogenesis, both domestically and in the broader context of geopolitics. It would be useful if the outlines of some key questions, and their answers, were at least formulated before the first working EGD was unveiled by the bioengineering community. We need to start having meaningful deliberations on ectogenesis now.
Regardless of how those discussions unfold within and among the democracies, several requirements are clear. Critically, the organizations in the democracies researching ectogenesis and related science and technology, such as large health care facilities and IVF clinics, should not share their expertise and learnings with China, Russia or scientists from any other autocracy.
Put another way, the democracies should implement a broad and far-reaching technological decoupling with the autocracies when it comes to ectogenesis. The democracies should not be in any hurry to help an autocrat extricate himself from his difficult position on population issues. If the result is regime change, such that the autocracy transforms into a democracy – well, that just might be the most remarkable birth by ectogenesis of them all.