The amazing, indispensable female body

Happy Mother's Day!

I've just discovered another couple of cool sites relevant to this blog: The Women’s Bioethics Project blog and the Center for Genetics and Society. For all those of you either thinking of keep the wolf at the door at bay by donating eggs or those who might use donated eggs, the CGS tracks the ethics and science of egg donation, among other topics. Bottom line: egg donation is painful and dangerous, much more so than the companies that harvest eggs let on. Apparently the latest industry effort to expand its business is trying to convince women to harvest their eggs and freeze them for procreation later, when they’ve established their careers. Don’t go for it, this site suggests. Stick with the old-fashioned form of impregnation.

Doing away with the need for women’s bodies is a long fantasy of science fiction and indeed of science. But the Women’s Bioethics Project explains, along with lots of other topics, the difficulty of creating an artificial womb. Although we’re often treated to news stories that assume we are the products of genes alone—that we are our genes—more and more scientific research is demonstrating the indispensability of the whole maternal body for creating a baby. Quoting another blogger, the site reports that we’re many decades off from a successful “human uterine replicator” (and that might be optimistic). “Even once we've sorted out the technical aspects of the womb itself, we'll have to deal with what the rest of the mother's body contributes to development.” (Which, by the way, has important implications for surrogacy. Even though, post–Baby M, most surrogates carry babies that are not genetically related to them, the importance of the gestating body to development suggests that the surrogate has to be regarded as biologically related to the baby she carried, and therefore she has some parental rights.)

Déjà vu all over again. We’re always hearing that the female body is defective and could be readily improved upon by science. Except whenever it's put to the test, technology falls short of the old-fashioned female body. Remember how formula was supposed be as good and maybe even superior to breast milk? Then scientists began discovering myriad ways that mother’s milk is better than any artificial milk. Same thing, apparently, with gestation. Doesn’t look like us moms will be obsolete any time soon. (In case you were worried.) Happy Mother’s Day—you’re amazing!