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Justice for the womb: Research ethics and the quest for ectogenesis

For many decades, bioethicists have considered how the artificial womb will impact society and what we should do with it when it arrives. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to the research ethics of developing this technology. In this talk, I explore the historical trajectories through which artificial womb research has developed and the narratives that have shaped this particular technological quest. Has our intellectual inheritance led us to treat the biological womb with unreasonable suspicion, or should we treat artificial womb research like the development of dialysis or the production of the pacemaker? The biological womb may have been unfairly maligned in the past, but it does not necessarily follow that pursuit of synthetic alternatives reinforces those attitudes. Nevertheless, I suggest that we may still have justice based reasons to abandon this pursuit.

Dr Teresa Baron: I'm a Nottingham Research Fellow working on reproductive ethics and philosophy of parenthood. I was previously a postdoc at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.