The Future of Conception

Posted by Jessica Cussins January 8, 2015
Biopolitical Times

Numerous writers took advantage of the ending year to look broadly at just how drastically we are changing the process of baby-making, and what it all means for society.

Mirah Riben recalls the dystopian visions of Brave New World, Handmaid's Tale, and The Giver in a piece in The Huffington Post. She points out that while all of these novels portray government control over reproduction, none envision the actual situation we now have in the US: “a free-for-all marketplace where regulation is unable to keep pace with reproductive science and the multi-billion dollar fertility-industry.”

She notes that it is this environment that has led to such developments as genetic selection for health and traits, the splitting of “motherhood” into increasingly disparate outsourced processes, and the creation and selling of desirable frozen embryos by private companies.

Riben concludes with the questions:

Will baby-making simply continue in this wild-west fashion? Is having a baby a "right" for everyone and anyone who can afford it, no matter how it is accomplished, with the means determined only by what is possible?

Looking at the particular ethical, legal, and human rights challenges of the international commercial surrogacy industry, human rights lawyer Claire Achmad asks similar questions in a piece in The Conversation.

Increasingly sci-fi technological developments complicate these issues further. News about womb transplants and bioengineered wombs or “uterine patches” using a patient’s own stem cells is discussed in The Atlantic, while developments in using skin cells to create artificial sperm and eggs are reported in The Guardian.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass considers a wealthy couple flouting Australian law to come to the US to ensure their next child is a girl. He raises concern about a future in which children are merely the product of our whims, arguing that such societal transformation will not be sudden and Kafka-esque (waking up to find oneself having turned into a gigantic insect) but that “our transformation will likely be gradual, perhaps imperceptible. It won’t merely be a matter of style or different languages or dialects. We will have forgotten the questions.”

Decidedly more Kafka-esque is biotech start-up CEO Austen Heinz’ vision of the future, which would enable anyone to tinker with the genetic material of pretty much anything. For more on this, see Pete Shanks’ new Biopolitical Times post, “Bad Boy Scientism.”

Additional human bioengineering scenarios were laid out in MIT Technology Review’s overview of 2014, which was called “a big year for rewriting biology” thanks to improved developments in whole genome sequencing, precision gene-editing, and a range of neurotechnologies.

In our free-for-all society, questions about whether – and if so, how much – to exert biological control over the future of humanity have moved well beyond the pages of dystopian novels. The answers lie increasingly only with us.

Previously on Biopolitical Times: