Like a Virgin (32 page)

How will this new technology alter the identity of a mother, a role that would cease to trigger a biological bond, even if her own egg is used? For instance, there has been a great deal of
research into the hormones oxytocin and arginine vasopressin. In mammals, the levels of these hormones are elevated in mothers’ brains. Oxytocin levels also increase during labour and reach a
peak at the time of delivery. Both oxytocin and vasopressin have been linked to the instinct towards maternal care and mother–child and other affectionate, family bonding. The hormones have
even been seen to rise when mothers engage in other supportive and bonding behaviours, long after pregnancy, though it is not known how and why this occurs. If a mother did not experience the
increase in hormones related to pregnancy, would it make a difference later in life? Would it be possible to give a mother a dose of the hormones, in place of this natural release? It is apparent,
from the experiences of many adoptive mothers, that a mother–child bond forms even in the absence of pregnancy, but it may be that those who choose to adopt happen also to have a strong
instinct for maternal care.
It may be that separating the physical experience of pregnancy from the body of a mother also requires separating it from the mother’s
biological brain.

Further, since a child’s identity is in part shaped by the communication of hormones and other information from mother to foetus, pregnancy via an artificial womb would redefine what it
means to be a biological parent. Perhaps in the future a mother who uses an artificial womb will primarily be seen as a
genetic
and
social
parent, since all of the biological
exchanges of pregnancy will gain new significance. Could the artificial womb become yet another symbol of the ways in which a woman is or is not a ‘good mother’? By relinquishing the
chance to shape her child’s development from embryo to full term, a mother might be ensuring a more resilient temperament for her offspring, after all. In a case where a woman uses a donor
egg and an artificial womb (by choice or necessity), the baby will have neither gestated with the mother nor bear any of her genes. Would the egg donor have more legal rights to the child in this
case? In these ways, the very concept of an artificial womb reveals how societies view women. Even in the twenty-first century, a woman is still often defined by her role in procreation.

Consider, for instance, surrogacy, the practice of using another person’s womb to carry your embryo to term. The role of surrogate mother, sometimes described as putting up a ‘womb
for rent’, is considered by some to be exploitation, especially as the practice has been more and more often outsourced to countries where a high proportion of the population live in poverty.
Countries such as India.

Since 2002, when the Indian government legalized paid surrogate pregnancy – critics say they did so in the hopes of giving birth to a new ‘pink-collar’ industry – young
Indian women have been queuing up to become surrogate mothers. There are
doctors in nearly every major Indian city working with women who want to be surrogates; there is even
a town in the state of Gujarat – its name is Anand, which in Sanskrit means ‘bliss’ – that is poised to claim the mantle of the nation’s go-to centre for paid
pregnancy. In 2009, one Mumbai doctor told the London
Evening Standard
newspaper that she delivers more than fifteen babies for British couples every month – about one every
forty-eight hours. (Unfortunately, despite the legalization of the service, the government does not keep reliable numbers of how many women have become surrogates.)

It’s not surprising that Indian women are signing up in hordes – they are paid between $6000 and $10,000 (£3700–£6000) to be a surrogate, which amounts to about
fifteen years’ wages, on average. The rise in infertility in industrial nations is certainly fuelling this ‘business’, as commercial surrogacy is banned in most of Europe and in
many US states. Couples, most commonly from the UK, US, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia, go to India to take advantage of these services, because, even with the travel costs, it will cost
them just one third of what it would in their home countries.

There are complications to this outsourced labour. Women in India are sixty-nine times as likely to die from childbirth-related issues due to inadequate access to good medical facilities. The
Indian government has not put in place any regulations to protect the rights of surrogate mothers. As it stands, surrogate mothers are looked after during their pregnancies, but they receive no
compensation for medical difficulties that arise after childbirth. These women are at risk of long-term liver problems – a side effect of being pumped full of the hormones used to prepare the
body for pregnancy. They also may face the common complications of pregnancy: the risks of toxaemia, anaesthesia, and haemorrhage, to name but a few. Further, it has been documented that many
couples who have returned from using
surrogate services in India have delivered twins. Multiple births generally mean lower birth weights for the babies and more dangers that
arise to the mother during childbirth – so much so that implantation of more than one embryo during IVF is frowned upon by the National Health Service.

Plus, we just do not know what are the true risks of carrying a child to term who has no genetic relation to you. We do know that a mother who has been exposed to a partner’s sperm before
she conceives his child is less likely to suffer from pre-eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition in which blood pressure and urine protein levels soar. Pre-eclampsia may be related to
immune recognition, that is, when the mother’s immune system antibodies, after being exposed to the father’s foreign antigens, allow the placenta to penetrate the wall of her uterus
more deeply. Researchers have found that the many genes that control the growth of the placenta are expressed from only the father’s DNA. This could mean that the growth of an embryo and its
supporting placenta in the body of a woman who has never been exposed to the genetic father’s antigens,
and
who herself has given no genetic input into that embryo, may be up against
an as-yet-uncatalogued threat to her immune system – as well as that of the foetus she is carrying.

There are also looming issues unrelated to health. In one recent case, a Japanese couple who had paid an Indian surrogate ended up divorcing, and the ex-wife no longer wanted the baby –
who had not yet been born. The surrogate mother didn’t want the baby either, and under Indian law, she was prevented from handing over the child to the father. After much legal wrangling, the
paternal grandmother was given custody of the infant.

Surrogacy in India is a lucrative business, and family hierarchies in the country still hold great power – especially over their female members – which raises the question of whether
all of the women caught up in the system are truly doing so out of choice. Could some families be putting pressure on their young women to join the ranks of surrogate mothers
in order to benefit household economics? One family, for instance, was recorded to have three sisters pregnant as surrogates at the same time; their sister-in-law was pregnant with her second
surrogate child too. Likewise, many surrogate mothers live in houses that have been described as akin to a fertility reality show. For the duration of their pregnancy, up to fifteen expectant
mothers may be packed into a house, where they are overseen, Big Brother-style, by a former surrogate mother.

A doctor who implants embryos in surrogate mothers at a prominent Mumbai clinic reported to the London
Evening Standard
that business is very fertile indeed. ‘Surrogacy is spreading
at a very fast pace here and there have been very few complaints,’ he said. ‘Our email inquiry box is full of messages from people from all over the West.’ Another fertility
specialist at the clinic emphasizes the convenience in his pitch: ‘There is no paperwork involved; the couples don’t have to go through any lawyers; it’s a clean issue – and
there is no litigation.’ While such loopholes may be attractive to the doctors’ relatively wealthy clients, the Women’s Protection League of India disagrees that surrogacy is a
positive development for the surrogates themselves, especially with respect to their health. A spokesperson for the group said, in no uncertain terms, ‘This is exploitation and I totally
condemn surrogacy.’

An artificial womb could be the great equalizer for women – a way to end the exploitation of another woman’s body in order to bear a child when one woman discovers that her own body
cannot do so for her, or even if she decides that it’s simply not convenient to do so. It would mean that a woman’s big life choice would be
whether
she will bear her child,
rather than
when
she might do it. And this liberated mother could carry
on with her life as usual up until the moment of birth, much as most fathers do.

The invention of a human artificial womb might also mean that the divide between mother and father can be dispensed with; a womb outside a woman’s body would serve women without wombs,
transsexual men, and male same-sex couples equally without prejudice. For this reason, some feminists have argued that the quest for the artificial womb comes from a deep-seated desire to displace
women and dissociate birth from the maternal body – effectively, to erase the mother. And in a case of fact being stranger than philosophical fiction, an internet forum for fathers
campaigning for parental rights when marriages dissolve has seen messages advocating for an artificial womb – because it would free fathers from the tyranny of those mothers who keep men
apart from their children.

The cultural divide between mothers and fathers appears to be closing, at least in some parts of the world. Two generations ago, fathers were not as hands-on and engaged with child-rearing as
they are today. There hasn’t been a change in the biology of sex in that time; the change has come through our culture, including the tools available to us to equalize the distribution of
labour (in the sense of work). When an artificial womb becomes available, an equal distribution of labour (in the sense of childbirth) will finally be within reach. This will mean that women will
be freed from the dangers of pregnancy and will be able to work productively throughout gestation; it will also give men an essential tool towards being able to have a child entirely without a
woman, should they choose. But it also means we will have to consider the most basic questions of gender: why are the roles of mother and father still seen as different to most people on the
planet? Why can’t a man be a ‘mother’? Why do we care so much about what it means to be a ‘mother’ rather than to be a ‘parent’?

By all reasonable estimates, in the near future we will conquer the tyranny of time and the tyranny of the womb. The question remains if we can also conquer the tyranny of
human prejudice too.

The UK Office for National Statistics’ 2012 study of lone parents with dependant children reports that the traditional family household of a married couple with a child
or children is now three times less common than it was just a generation ago. Families headed by only one parent comprise twenty-five percent of households in the UK and twenty-eight percent in the
US, and in the US, the so-called nuclear family now accounts for fewer than twenty-five percent of households, compared to forty percent in 1970.

The majority of single-parent families are created by circumstance – separation, divorce or the death of a partner. Recent decades have also seen the rise, however, of the solo parent, a
name used to distinguish these single-parents-by-choice from other single-parent families where a two-adult household has been broken apart, often with economic consequences, and for that reason is
often associated with disadvantage and,
sometimes, pity.

Not so solo parents, who are generally, at this moment in reproductive history, single women in good financial circumstances who are approaching or just past the menopause, and who have made a
conscious decision to use advanced technology to go it alone. These women have not necessarily experienced infertility problems; instead, they turn to assisted conception techniques in order to
have a child of their own without a partner. The families that result are not always a solo mother and a solo child alone. Some solo parents want to give a sibling to an only child who may or may
not have been the product of a partner’s sperm.

Because of their age, many solo parents must use more than one reproductive technology when they decide to have a child. A woman nearing menopause and lacking a male partner will, for instance,
usually need a donated egg, donated sperm, and in vitro fertilization to bring the two together and then successfully implant them in her womb. On some levels, such a pregnancy is natural –
it’s just that all of the bits and pieces are happening outside the usual conception. The family that results isn’t related genetically, but its members are related
biologically
.
The births mimic everything that happens when a man and a woman have a child. In some cases, the solo mother might try to find donors that will provide genetic material that, on the surface,
appears to be their own, making it impossible for the person on the street (or at the nursery) to distinguish a solo-parent family from more ‘traditional’ types. Indeed, while most solo
mothers say they plan to tell their children that their father is a sperm donor, many admit that they probably will not tell their children that the egg that made them was donated too. We still put
a great deal of emphasis on the meaning of that genetic contribution, after all, and the desire to become a parent is wrapped up in those definitions.