iNEWS: Artificial wombs will save premature babies but present ethical concerns

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But it also raises concerns. For example, ex-utero gestation would likely turn reproductive rights on their head, says Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Manchester. If a foetus can gestate outside a woman’s body, the choice of whether or not to have the baby might be deemed out of her hands.Another issue is that our legal rights are predicated on having been born alive. “I don’t think that a gestating subject in an artificial womb necessarily meets that requirement,” says Romanis. “That raises some questions about human entities ex-utero that have never existed before.”