by Peter Breggin MD & Ginger Breggin

Originally posted on America Out Loud Dec 23, 2022 | Lifestyle, Politics

During this holy week of Christmas, I am reminded of one of the most profound but common miracles.

The reminder came via an article: the “World’s first ‘artificial womb facility’ is a creepy glimpse of pregnancy in the future.” The vision it presents is shocking. Egg-shaped, infant-sized clear plastic dishes lined up in long rows in a factory-like facility, each held a life-like pre-born infant being ‘grown’ in these containers.

EctoLife, the company conceived by Hashem Al-Ghaili, is conceived as being able to grow 30,000 babies per year and is prepared to serve those infertile couples who cannot conceive the old-fashioned way.

The company will offer packages enabling prospective parents to choose various genetic traits that will then be created in the pre-born human using Crispr and other genetic manipulation techniques. In addition to eliminating common diseases that are genetically based, the child will be truly designed. Hair and eye color, strength, intelligence, height, and other traits will be selectable.

Described as a blessing for couples unable to have children, the facility is said to offer a genuinely biological alternative. Al-Ghaili says that the complete science is in place, and all that remains is to put it all together as a prototype baby factory.

And this brings me back to Christmas, and thoughts of a young woman who gradually becomes aware of subtle changes in her body. New tenderness in the breast, a sense of vulnerability around her torso, and over a course of weeks, a gradual swelling. Eventually, the awareness of a new human being growing becomes more real until the full nine months are reached.   

Gravid, as the story goes, she traveled with her husband to a distant place and there gave birth to her son in a manger, because the inns were full. And they named the infant Jesus.

She wasn’t a baby factory. She was an individual human female gradually experiencing the common miracle of conception, pregnancy and birth. The same common miracle I and so many other women of the world have experienced. We are the reason the human race continues.

Eventually the technocrats may want to co-opt that responsibility with baby factories.

Each of us as pre-born infants passed through that development of pregnancy. Intimately, interiorly connected to our mother. Hearing the pulse of blood through her veins, feeling her move, being jostled when she was jostled. Feeling our heart beats speed up when she exerted herself. Being surrounded by her voice, her warmth, her feelings. Hearing her cry. What an incredible, intimate, experience of attachment and closeness.

The antithesis of a baby factory.

In this age of Corona, where all things human seem so mundane and dismissible, we need to cherish every experience that makes us human. And we need to embrace each experience that creates the capacity for connection, for attachment, for love.

Image: Hashem Al-Ghaili