- No, we can already have babies.
- Well, fair enough, you guys can.
- I'm Brit, and I'm a heretic
because I believe that human babies could
and often should be gestated not in their mothers' bodies
but in machines.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like,
but what if they’re right?
- Did I get it right? You smiled when I said your name.
Am I wrong? - No, that was perfect.
- Okay. - You got it.
Hi, I'm Brit Benjamin.
I'm a songwriter. I'm a mom. I'm a law lecturer,
and I write about constitutional law
and reproductive biotechnology.
What is heretical about the work that I do
is the idea that we can uncouple reproduction
from the human body through the use of ectogenesis,
which is artificial wombs.
Full ectogenesis is the idea of conceiving a baby in vitro,
and gestating that child
for the entire gestational period of 40 weeks.
I think what happens when people hear this idea,
whatever their political alignment,
is a disgust response.
People freak out!
But we already have partial ectogenesis
implemented in Neonatal Intensive Care Units
across the country and across the world
from anywhere from 21 weeks of gestation to full term.
So, almost half of the gestational period
required to make a healthy human being
can happen outside of the body already.
Traditional, natural gestation is very costly.
It's one of the most dangerous things
that many women will choose to do.
Artificial wombs allow women to choose
where they want to direct their labor
and their physical resources, while also not sacrificing
this, like, most important and precious
thing of having children.
How it would work is:
Much like we do IVF and we create embryos in vitro—
it would go into the artificial womb,
which the kind of best systems we have right now
are called “Biobags.”
They're basically chambers of fluid
that mimic amniotic fluid.
Every level you can imagine is monitored
and adjusted as the fetus grows and its needs change.
And then the mother would get a call.
"Ma'am your baby is ready," and she would go pick it up.
And then the rest would continue as expected,
except instead of being physically damaged
from labor and delivery,
she would have a lot more energy that she could give
to tending to that child,
or sharing tending of that child with her partner.
- What are the current obstacles to this?
What's the next hurdle before this becomes a reality?
- There are a few hurdles.
So, one is that there is an international standard
that the United States has adopted called the “14-day rule.”
When a human embryo is in vitro,
it cannot be gestated externally past 14 days.
So, after 14 days, we're sort of in the dark.
We've seen it done in lambs, goats, mice—
but they're not exactly analogous.
We really do need to explore these technologies more
in a human context.
I think the other major obstacle is fear.
I think there's something evolved in humans
to be attuned to the risks that come from major change,
like an evolved Chesterton's Fence intuition.
The idea that if you come across a fence
and you don't know why it's there,
you should really find out why whoever put the fence up
put it up before you take it down.
So, I think attunement to that risk of the unknown is wise.
But as I was saying earlier, a lot of that fear
I think is just an unconscious, disgust response.
It is a pretty unique human experience to gestate a baby,
and to have a human being growing in your body.
I'm a stepmother to two and a biological mother to one,
and my pregnancy was trivial. It was awesome! I felt great!
So, my attachment to artificial wombs
is not the result of personal injury resulting from pregnancy,
but I think there are a lot of women,
women who are at risk in pregnancy,
which is many more of us than most people realize
until they're considering having children
or have had children.
Having children is the most powerful, evolutionary instinct.
It is the most meaningful, wonderful, beautiful thing.
And I don't envision a future in which all women
are gestating their babies in artificial wombs
and we sort of lose touch with that,
the biological basis of our reproduction.
I don't think that's going to happen
but if there's a way to make it easier
for women to have children more safely, we should do that.
J.B.S. Haldane has a great quote that is,
"There is no great invention, from fire to flying,
that was not first hailed as an insult to some god."
And so, that's where the insanity comes in.
We have this, like, evolved, disgust response
that comes up when big changes are proposed,
and that's not the part of the brain we should be evaluating
the merits and demerits of technologies from.
It's making something that most of us will choose to do
at some point in our lifetime a little bit safer,
a little bit more predictable, and that that's a good thing.
- Babies are bad at everything.
That's something no one will say but it's true.
- Babies are bad at everything except being so cute.