The female body as a host? A reflection on artificial womb technology and ‘natural’ reproduction af Smilla Jensen
Whenever thinking about children, and you frequently do when approaching 30 years old (it might be some kind of a natural mechanism, what do I know), with your boyfriend leaving you to play PlayStation and get a couple of beers, one as a woman might start to wonder why to go through the burden of childbearing, when not even cared for. The mind goes wicked places like reflecting on what it would mean for our differences in reproductive stress, if that boyfriend had the same bodily responsibility invested in having children. Questions like that haunt my mind every time I have to move through a breakup, not even wanting to find a new partner, that has no feeling of the same stress either. Going through that, I started speculating on how future technology might eliminate that stress I and other young women carry, the responsibility of our bodies, having to put it through pregnancy to be able to have children. A thought of an artificial womb came to mind, and I started reflecting on what implications it would have for our lives as women if we were able to have children without getting pregnant. Artificial womb technology is not only a personal daydream but an actual field of study, experimenting on how to keep prematurely born organisms alive.1 With the technology advancing, society need to discuss the implications of using it for preimplantation as well, which is well described in the literature.2 But from my point of view, the technology has got a lot more to it than the immediate discussion on when and if we will use it or not. Carl Hedman discusses artificial womb technology within a thought experiment, where the technology serves as a Rorschach test revealing intuitions on its progressive 16
