Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
We can imagine a world in which ectogenesis provides a safe gestating space that eliminates maternal morbidity and mortality while maximising healthy outcomes for babies. In this world, women, no longer physically—and visibly—pregnant, are no longer economically, socially or physically disadvantaged due to the potential for pregnancy and birth. Because everyone can access the same technology, women are able to work without fear of pregnancy-related discrimination or restrictions, and health disparities among individuals in gestation and birth based on socioeconomic status are eliminated. This imagining allows us to explore the ethical and social underpinnings of such a world, and consider how to achieve it in our current paradigm. Having explored the freedom and equality that is possible in an ideal hypothetical where all have equal access to such technologies, we can now imagine that same world without ectogenesis: women, no longer economically, socially or physically disadvantaged due to pregnancy and birth, despite still becoming pregnant. Such is the potential political perspective and provocation that can be spurred on by discussion of ectogenesis.
As Cavaliere argues, the technological reality of ectogenesis may not achieve the freedom and equality that …
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Gestation, equality and freedom: ectogenesis as a political perspective
- Partial ectogenesis: freedom, equality and political perspective
- Commentary on ‘Gestation, Equality and Freedom: Ectogenesis as a Political Perspective’
- Impact of ectogenesis on the medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth
- ‘Gestation, Equality and Freedom: Ectogenesis as a Political Perspective’ response to commentaries
- Reproductive technologies are not the cure for social problems
- Gender, gestation and ectogenesis: self-determination for pregnant people ahead of artificial wombs
- Abortion and Ectogenesis: Moral Compromise
- Willing mothers: ectogenesis and the role of gestational motherhood
- Reviewing the womb