There have been many great advances in science, particularly in the medical field, such as the discovery of organ transplant possibilities and prosthetic limbs, but perhaps the most controversial research topic in the medical field of science is that of human life and how far science can take us in developing life in a laboratory. Recently, scientists have developed prototype-level technology known as ectogenesis, which allows them to create an artificial womb and grow fetuses in it. While this scientific development brings some advantages for women, it also comes with several problems. Women have always been required to conceive and give birth to an infant, giving women and their children an intrinsic physical bond, strengthening the bond between mother and child, but with this artificial uterus, mothers will lose their parental bond, without which parents would risk losing their children’s affection; When a couple uses an artificial womb to grow their fetus into a fully developed human child, the parents lose the physical connection that they would have shared with their child if it had grown inside of a natural uterus. Being grown inside of a machine as opposed to a woman’s womb could leave major psychological scars on a child, which could lead a child made through ectogenesis think that since its parents didn’t birth it, they are not really its parents, and therefore don’t have any real parental authority over the child. By using an artificial womb, children would no longer be the product of the love between a man and a woman, but was instead made in what is essentially a glorified incubator. In fact, the development of an artificial womb would make sex, both the unitive aspect and the procreative aspect, completely obsolete, being nothing but a means to pleasure. With sex being nothing but a means to pleasure oneself, then there is no reason why a homosexual couple cannot be together; even though two men or two women cannot impregnate each other, the artificial womb allows them to not only have children, but have children made of their own genetic material instead of adopting or having surrogate parent. In addition to these issues, scientists have to be able to create an artificial endometrium, as well as placenta and amniotic fluid. In order to do so, experiments must be run, but human testing is commonly viewed as immoral, so scientists have to run these experiments on animals, which, despite being better than experimenting on humans, is still a cruel thing to do, considering that animals feel pain too. Despite the animal cruelty, scientists have successfully used artificial placenta to keep goat fetuses alive for a period of 237 hours in amniotic tanks (Yoshinori Kuwabara, Artificial Organs Volume 17, Issue 12, Wiley Online Library), but even this advancement on artificial placenta has not been enough to sustain a goat fetus, and much less a human one. Even if scientists are able to successfully produce artificial placenta and apply it to human fetuses, the nature of the resulting child and its humanity are questionable.
These children, being produced in a laboratory, with enough advancement in cloning research, could be potentially mass produced, which not only creates great political issues, since any one country with access to enough artificial wombs can potentially grow an army, but also leads to a crisis of identity crisis; if scientists can make an exact copy of a human being inside of a laboratory with little to no limitations on the amount of clones that can be made, and multiple copies of a person are living at the same time, it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish the real one from the copies made artificially. However, no matter how much technology advances, the human soul is not something that can be reproduced in a lab, so a completely identical clone would not actually be possible to make, and the resulting person would be more of an identical twin than a clone. Regardless of whether a