Sound The Trumpet - The Wailers / Bob Marley
When he was still in utero, my brother would kick along to the beat of reggae songs. His sense of rhythm was not inborn, but preborn. Most of us might have had such a sense; one study found that the heart rate of an eight-month fetus will speed up when it hears a language with an unfamiliar rhythm.
I wonder if, in my lifetime, some people will be born without growing inside a uterus. It seems we are less than a decade away from extremely premature babies being placed in artificial wombs, given a chance to gestate for a few weeks longer as the aquatic creatures they are. A team in Philadelphia has already birthed lambs from biobags.
I am attracted to the disruptive potential of reproduction outside of a body. Anna Smajdor, a Finnish bioethicist, has argued that we have a moral imperative to develop this technology of ectogenesis , in order to reduce maternal suffering and equalize reproductive labour. In a Guardian article about artificial wombs from earlier this year, she is quoted as follows: “Pregnancy is barbaric. If there were any disease that caused the same problems, we would regard it as very serious. The number of women who suffer tears and incontinence, and things that damage them for the rest of their lives is really high, yet it’s not adequately recognised. This is all tied up with the strong value we attach not just to motherhood, but to giving birth.”
I learned recently that women in Nigeria—the seventh-most populous country in the world, so a place where a lot of women live—have a 1 in 22 lifetime risk of dying during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum/post-abortion. (In most developed countries, the lifetime risk is closer to 1 in 5000.) Pregnancy is very serious, though I admit I am doubtful that most of those Nigerians would experience equalizing reproductive justice from the invention of artificial wombs.
Still… a biopunk dismantling of the sex and gender binary? Yes, please. I feel like we’re already seeing some dismantling of gendered disparities around breastfeeding. A colleague’s babies were entirely fed on bottles of pumped breastmilk, and so didn’t turn to his wife more than him when they were hungry. He wasn’t under any illusion that this equalized the labour—pumping breastmilk is a ton of work—but, still, a disparity was erased. I know another family where two couples are co-parenting children together, and when their most recent baby was born, they were able to share breastfeeding among three women with the help of some galactagogue pills. Artificial wombs would clearly not be a sufficient justice, nor a strictly necessary one, but I still want to see them!
Towards the gradual supplanting of the natural with the just,
Tessa