Witnessing the immense amount of innovation in the last few decades, I had started thinking that nothing will surprise me anymore. In a way, we have become conditioned to expect the unexpected and for stuff of science fiction to become reality.

But every now and then, I come across something that make me raise my eyebrows. Today I read an article about artificial wombs and that scientists plan on making it a reality within a decade. Within a decade!!

You might have seen this in movies and tv shows where in a futuristic society parents grow their fetus in an artificial womb. Well, it might not be too long before we could be doing that ourselves.

At the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, USA, doctors are already in talks with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) to allow them to start testing artificial wombs for human embroys.

Artificial Birth

The idea of an artificial womb is that it allows for a fetus to grow outside the mother's body in a device capable of sustaining the fetus until it develops completely. This can have several benefits for the baby as well as the mother, by preventing any complications that can arise during the pregnancy or birth.

It would also do away with the discomforts of pregnancy and could be of real importance for women with past miscarriages or for women for whom pregnancy is not advisable. There are benefits for gay couples as well as they wouldn't require surrogate mothers.

Right now, we just don't know what the real positives and negatives might be of this technology and the ethical questions that arise would be needed to be answered as well.

This would certainly not be 'natural' but we've seen society advance and accept the unnatural in favour of convenience and safety, so we might go the same route with artificial wombs as well, given that there might be some real advantages here.