Article content continued

Photo by Nature

The developers of the Biobag certainly hope to move from tests on lambs to tests on human babies. Their “extra-uterine” device was designed to revolutionize the treatment of severely premature newborns. The goal is to offer a bridge between a natural womb and the outside world to give babies born at 23 to 25 weeks of gestation more time for their fragile lungs to mature.

But as fetal surgeon Alan Flake, who is leading development of the Biobag at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said: “I want to make very clear that this device is not related to complete ectogenesis — never intended to be, will never be and it’s just not likely to happen.”

For some, that’s a relief. The prospect of synthetic, substitute wombs raises stark questions about how far we want to go in uncoupling reproduction from human bodies, the role of the mother and placenta in fetal development and the way our society thinks about how women are expected to behave during pregnancy.

For others, an artificial womb would be the ultimate gender equalizer — freeing women from the inconvenience, pain and sometimes significant risks of pregnancy and childbirth, and giving single or gay men an alternative to surrogacy.

It’s clear that at some level growing embryos in dishes will intersect the technology to keep embryos and fetuses alive artificially

And many experts disagree that the world’s first “ecto-baby” is either unlikely or all that far off. In addition to the Biobag, two international teams recently succeeded in keeping human embryos conceived through IVF alive in a laboratory for 12 to 13 days — shattering the old record of nine days and one day shy of the “14-day rule,” a voluntary prohibition among scientists limiting human embryo research to the period before the appearance of the “primitive streak,” a band of cells that mark the beginnings of the brain and spinal cord.