Brave new world alert! Scientists used a machine deployed in organ transplant medicine to keep a surgically removed human uterus alive for one day, furthering the goal of being able to use donated uteri experimentally over long periods of time, including for gestation. From the MIT Technology story:
The team members want to keep donated human uteruses alive long enough to see a full menstrual cycle. They hope this will help them study diseases of the uterus and learn more about how embryos burrow their way into the organ’s lining at the start of a pregnancy. They also hope that future iterations of their device might one day sustain the full gestation of a human fetus.
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The machine is technically called PUPER, which stands for “preservation of the uterus in perfusion.” But González’s colleague Xavier Santamaria says the team has adopted a nickname for it: “We call it ‘Mother.’”
Well, that’s reductionist and instrumentalizing. Gestating a baby involves far more of the mother’s body and self than a functioning uterus. She gives her very being to her baby. Indeed, we all have millions of our mother’s cells in our own bodies.
The scientific and financial drive for unlimited reproductive technologies is driving this train:
The foundation’s founder and director, Carlos Simon, believes it’s a sticking point in IVF: Scientists have made many improvements to the technology over the years, but the failure of embryos to implant underlies plenty of unsuccessful IVF cycles, he says. Being able to carefully study how the process works in a real, living organ might give the team a better idea of how to prevent those failures.
Some of the experiments would be scientifically valuable and ethical (a uterus has no intrinsic value in and of itself):
They’d like to be able to keep their uteruses alive for around 28 days to study the menstrual cycle and disorders that affect the uterus, like endometriosis and fibroids.
But this is a significant ethical problem:
The team’s main interest is learning more about how embryos implant in the uterine lining at the start of a pregnancy. They hope to be able to test the process in their outside-the-body uteruses.
They won’t be allowed to use human embryos for this, says González — that would cross an ethical boundary. Instead, they plan to use embryo-like structures made from stem cells. The structures closely resemble human embryos but are created in a lab without sperm or eggs.
It is not at all certain that these “embryo-like” entities aren’t human organisms. Merely asserting that doesn’t make it so. Moreover, cloned human embryos are not made with sperm and eggs and are just as human as you and I are — just as Dolly was fully a sheep.
But that limitation is not the end:
Simon himself has grander ambitions.
He sees a future in which a machine like “Mother” will be able to fully gestate a human, all the way from embryo to newborn. It could offer a new path to parenthood for people who don’t have a uterus, for example, or who are not able to get pregnant for other reasons.
So, the plan ultimately is to manufacture human life solely for experimenting upon, toward the utilitarian end of making embryos and fetuses that might eventually be used for “fetal farming” — obtaining organs for transplant from the unborn, etc. — or be sustained to birth.
Not only would such experiments not be for the benefit and welfare of the human beings thereby created, but would denigrate the intrinsic importance of mothering during pregnancy and further the end of establishing novel family structures (“parenthood for people who don’t have a uterus” — and Simon doesn’t mean fathers).
At the very least, such goals further the idea that unborn humans are mere resources with no rights that the born are bound to respect.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
