Strap yourselves in for this one, kids, because we're about to enter Aldous Huxley's world.
An argument popped up on X between some men and women regarding artificial wombs, and my curiosity got the best of me. I hadn't checked in on the progress of the tech in some time, but last year, when I had looked into it, we weren't that far away.
It was close enough for me to predict that it would likely merge with another emerging technology, AI robots, which I imagined would eventually replace people in terms of romantic partners in the next 50 or so years. Possibly sooner. Pending an apocalyptic disaster, I can put a lot of money on that happening because, in a way, it already is.
Gen Alpha has already made it clear that they prefer AI companions over real ones. Because, according to Gen A males, Gen A girls are too complicated and emotionally dangerous.
But Stanford law and bioethics expert, Prof. Henry Greely, published a piece at the BBC that gave me serious pause.
In an article titled "The end of sex? How human reproduction could soon change forever," Greely notes that the technology around artificial wombs opens up some doors, but it's going to close a whole lot more. For starters, he sees people still having sex, but sex for the sake of procreation will become a rarity. Perhaps even a novelty.
He notes that technology is developing to the point where sex isn't necessary to procreate, and soon, a woman's womb won't be... nor will sperm or eggs:
The step change will be in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) – turning skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, then turning those into eggs and sperm. IVG is tremendously exciting to millions of couples, but it does raise some tricky questions.
For example, if we could make eggs from skin cells, 90-year-olds could become genetic parents. So could nine-year-olds, miscarried foetuses or people who have been dead for years, but whose cells were frozen.
Did you catch that?
Effectively, they could take your skin cells, change them into sperm and/or egg cells, they could make the elderly into new parents, give miscarried fetuses a second chance... and raise the dead.
How far away is that technology?
It's here, as Greely notes. In fact, it's been here for three years:
In 2023, Japanese scientists announced that they had made eggs from a male mouse’s skin cells and, using ‘normal’ mouse sperm, had produced mouse pups.
Greely goes on to say that you could take skin cells from the same person and create sperm and egg cells from the same person. This "unibaby," as he calls it, would not be a clone, but so genetically similar to you that they'd be closer in genetic similarity than your brother or sister. Like a twin.
You could even take a group of people, merge their cells into an embryo, and have a baby that could contain the genetic material from every person in the group. Greely calls it "multiplex parenting."
In the past, I brought up a technology called CRISPR or "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats," which is a technology that effectively allows a specialist to dive into someone's DNA and create a person with all the desired traits you want. As I noted in my own article, this technology would be fantastic for weeding out diseases and conditions that have haunted humanity for ages, but it could make designer babies, which I consider unethical.
Read: The Transhumanist Conversation From One Christian's Perspective
Little did I know, when I wrote that piece in 2025, that this had already happened in China in 2018:
In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of two girls whose embryos he had ‘CRISPRed’ earlier that year. Unfortunately, he did this work in secret, in ways that violated both human research ethics and Chinese law.
A Chinese court sentenced him to three years in prison, and the court of international opinion condemned him as a renegade. (Those first two babies are now over five years old, but China has released no information about their health or genetic makeup.)
And this brings us to artificial wombs, something Huxley foresaw about in "Brave New World" where babies were born in "hatcheries."
You probably know about the lamb born from an artificial womb, but what you might not know is that the FDA held a meeting to talk about beginning artificial womb trials on human babies. Greely says the tech is here, but it's not perfect. The initial gestation phase would still have to happen inside a woman.
To reiterate my point, a lot of this technology can be used for good. Ask anyone with conditions like Lupus or a debilitating disease like Lou Gehrig's if they'd rather have that CRISPR'd out of them before birth, and the vast majority would likely say yes.
Artificial wombs could be a blessing as well. Imagine a world where abortion can be made wholly illegal, but the baby can be removed and transferred to an artificial womb where it can have a chance at life.
But it's also pretty clear that we're developing technologies that could, if misused, blow right past any ethical boundaries we've erected for ourselves in our saner moments. Tossing our responsibility for procreation to machines would inevitably make us feel less connected to our offspring. Naturally born babies whose DNA hasn't been manipulated would become a novelty.
What kind of world would that look like? What kind of humanity would we lose? What kind of civilization would that create?
I'm not sure it would be a good one.
