The Artificial Womb

Hm, is this what I need?

From The Observer:

"Doctors are developing artificial wombs in which embryos can grow outside a woman's body. The work has been hailed as a breakthrough in treating the childless.

Scientists have created prototypes made out of cells extracted from women's bodies. Embryos successfully attached themselves to the walls of these laboratory wombs and began to grow..."

This is getting weird; will women (and men?) someday be obsolete? Is it unequivocably good to trick an embryo to attach to an artificial womb? Could one view this project as a male attempt at claiming, through technology, a process that once was uniquely a woman's? It's all a little too Brave New World for me:

"This hive of industry," as the Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work. Every one was busy, everything in ordered motion. Under the microscopes, their long tails furiously lashing, spermatozoa were burrowing head first into eggs; and, fertilized...From the Social Predestination Room the escalators went rumbling down into the basement, and there, in the crimson darkness, stewingly warm on their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew and grew or, poisoned, languished into a stunted Epsilonhood. With a faint hum and rattle the moving racks crawled imperceptibly through the weeks and the recapitulated aeons to where, in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement."

from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

I think you remember what happens next...dystopia!

p.s. thanks for all your notes of support--very much appreciated. You can see you've helped me feel better as I'm back bringing you the best/worst of fertility related news...